Romantic Disillusionism and the Sceptical Tradition [1 ed.] 9783737006323, 9783847106326

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Super alta perennis Studien zur Wirkung der Klassischen Antike

Band 20

Herausgegeben von Uwe Baumann, Marc Laureys und Winfried Schmitz

Rolf P. Lessenich

Romantic Disillusionism and the Sceptical Tradition

V& R unipress Bonn University Press

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet þber http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. ISSN 2198-6134 ISBN 978-3-7370-0632-3 Weitere Ausgaben und Online-Angebote sind erhÐltlich unter: www.v-r.de Verçffentlichungen der Bonn University Press erscheinen im Verlag V& R unipress GmbH.  2017, V& R unipress GmbH, Robert-Bosch-Breite 6, D-37079 Gçttingen / www.v-r.de Alle Rechte vorbehalten. Das Werk und seine Teile sind urheberrechtlich gesch þtzt. Jede Verwertung in anderen als den gesetzlich zugelassenen FÐllen bedarf der vorherigen schriftlichen Einwilligung des Verlages. Titelbild: ThØodore GØricault, Le radeau de la MØduse (1819, Paris, Louvre).  bpk / RMN – Grand Palais / Michel Urtado

Experience is the chief philosopher, But saddest when his science is well known. Byron, Don Juan (1819–1824) Our life is a false nature, ’t is not in The harmony of things. Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–1818) I lament now, I must ever lament, those few short months of Paradisiacal bliss; I disobeyed no command, I ate no apple, and yet I was ruthlessly driven from it. Mary Shelley, Matilda (MS 1819–1820) Je ne crois pas, i Christ! / ta parole sainte: Je suis venu trop tard dans un monde trop vieux. D’un siHcle sans espoir na%t un siHcle sans crainte; Les comHtes du nitre ont d8peupl8 les cieux. Alfred de Musset, Rolla (1833) Poor bird, that cannot ever Dwell high in tower of song: Whose heart-breaking endeavour But palls the lazy throng. Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1844–1848) Le romantisme est une gr.ce, c8leste ou infernale, / qui nous devons des stigmates 8ternels. Charles Baudelaire, Salon de 1859 Nature’s dark side is heeded now – (Ah! optimist-cheer disheartened flown) – Herman Melville, Misgivings (1860)

Contents

The Two Sides of Romanticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

9

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

31

I

Romantic Disillusionism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

129

II

Heterogeneous Man’s Weak Will and Mind . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

191

III The Vanity of the Passions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1) The Vanity of Love . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2) The Vanity of Glory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

231 231 278

IV The Injustice of the World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

309

V

Doubt of Synthesis: The Aimlessness of History . . . . . . . . . . .

335

VI Doubt of Resurrection and Regeneration: Cultural Pessimism . . .

379

VII Man’s Isolation and Progressive Disappointment . . . . . . . . . .

409

VIII The Falseness of Philosophical Essentialism and Systems . . . . . .

433

Retrospect and Outlook: The Intellectual Searcher’s Negative Epiphany .

455

Select Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

461

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

473

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The revival of Plato and Platonism – in the sense of all philosophies and theologies that derived their ultimate inspiration from Plato1 – in eighteenth-century Preromanticism and Romanticism was a reaction against the Enlightenment’s programme of divorcing metaphysics from philosophy including aesthetics, and its consequent low estimation of Plato’s and Platonism’s “reveries” and “ungrounded fanatic fancy” as in the writings of Johann Jakob Brucker, Voltaire, d’Holbach, Samuel Parker, and Samuel Johnson. Platonism’s heterogeneity, diffuseness, and incoherence in the history of philosophy and cultural memory notwithstanding, integral theory distinguishes the idealist Platonic traditions from the empiricist and materialist Western ones. “Tous les sp8cialistes de l’histoire du platonisme sont donc conscients de l’8cart qui existe entre le texte des dialogues et la tradition platonicienne, ou platonisante”.2 Through the mediation of Origen, whose Christian theology was heavily influenced by the Pagan Neoplatonists, and St Augustine, whom Platonism had converted from Manichaeism to Christianity, and through the mediation of Marsilio Ficino’s syncretic Theologia Platonica as well as Erasmus (“O Sancte Socrate, ora pro nobis”), Platonism remained an indelible presence in the Christian world even when not acknowledged, integrating Christianity in the Classical Tradition. In the philosophy of the transition from the Enlightenment to Romanticism, one of Immanuel Kant’s great achievements was finding fault with and overcoming the Platonism-Empiricism dichotomy by reintroducing metaphysics through 1 For the diffuseness of Platonism see James A. Notopoulos, The Platonism of Shelley, Durham NC 1949; M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, New York NY 1971; and Dermot Moran, Neoplatonism and Christianity in the West, in: The Routledge Handbook of Neoplatonism, ed. Pauliina Remes – Svetla Slaveva–Griffin, London 2014, 508–524, who traces the intricacies of divergent Pagan and Christian Neoplatonic views to the “new outbreak of Christian Neoplatonism with the so-called Cambridge Platonists in the seventeenth century” (522). See also D.P. Walker, The Ancient Theology : Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century, London 1972. 2 Michel Brix, Platon et le platonisme dans la litt8rature franÅaise de l’.ge romantique, in: Romantisme, 113 (2001), 44.

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transcendental philosophy.3 It remains to be investigated in detail how the Preromantic Platonic Revival came about, what was the role played by the unforgotten late seventeeth-century Cambridge Platonists, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and by others. Platonism’s chief propagator in Romantic-Period England and America was Thomas Taylor (1758–1835), whose translations of Plato, Aristotle, and the ancient Neoplatonists such as Plotinus, Porphyry, and Proclus – rediscovered in German Romantic-Idealist philosophy 1781–1831 – exercised a considerable influence on such Romantic authors as William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. And Platonism’s chief propagator in Romantic-Period France was Hegel’s friend the eclectic philosopher Victor Cousin (1792–1867), translator of Plato’s dialogues and author of a famous treatise on the Platonic jakoj!cah_a, Du vrai, du beau et du bien (1836). The Platonic (also termed Positive) Romantics generally agreed with William Blake in preferring the breaking up rather than the dismissal of the Classical Tradition, mixing classical with non-classical myths and their own mythopoetic dreams and fantasies, contesting the Classical Tradition’s claim to hegemonic exclusivity and universal validity. They were visionaries who believed – or rather tried to believe – in the immutability of metaphysical revelations of unalterable and eternal truths and values inaccessible to the senses and independent of the world’s changes. Their Platonic-Christian idealism was still alive and acknowledged in the works of the American Transcendentalists though infected by their reading of the sceptic and empiricist David Hume, less doubt-ridden in Ralph Waldo Emerson, more doubt-ridden in Walt Whitman.4 Their opponents within the Romantic Movement were the pessimistic Romantic Disillusionists (also termed Romantic Sceptics or Negative Romantics). With the technique and arsenal of weapons typical of the Romantic Period’s Streitkultur, or art of arguing, inherited from and updated by the Classical Tradition (eristike techne),5 these would-be believers yet must-be realists voted with the sceptic Pyrrho (or, rather, what they believed Aristotle’s contemporary Pyrrho taught in his lost works) against the idealist Plato (or, rather, against the Christian and Pagan Platonism that resulted from Plato’s diffuse and syncretic 3 Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Platonismus, ed. Joachim Ritter, Darmstadt 1971– 2007, VII. 980–981. 4 See Emerson’s essay Plato, or, The Philosopher, 1850, in: Representative Men (1850) and Whitman’s poem The Base of All Metaphysics, 1871, in: Leaves of Grass (1855–1892). For the complexities and duplicities of Emerson’s and Whitman’s Platonism see Paul Giles, American Literature and Classical Consciousness, in: David Hopkins – Charles Martindale (gen. eds.), The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, vol. 4 (1790–1880), Oxford and New York NY 2015, 169–170. 5 Rolf Lessenich, Neoclassical Satire and the Romantic School 1780–1830, Super Alta Perennis, Göttingen 2012, passim.

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reception in the Christian West). Blake, for instance, was a Platonic-Gnostic Christian, and William Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode” that paradoxically saw the child as father of the man resumed the Platonic-Gnostic tradition of the Corpus Hermeticum (1st to 3rd centuries AD) translated by Ficino.6 The Romantic Disillusionists, avoiding deception on both socio-political and personal levels, inverted the ranking of Platonism over Pyrrhonism, although they cannot have been blind to the symptoms of doubt in the Platonism of their adversaries and their occasional adoption of decidedly Disillusionist positions. Platonic foundationalism and optimism became their ostensible targets in their efforts to bring man back to the truth of daily experienced reality.7 The case of the antiPlatonist Herman Melville, a reader and student of Byron, who even visited the Holy Land in an unsuccessful effort to retrieve the lost Christian faith of his childhood, shows how the experience of injustice and war in the name of religion turned would-be Romantic believers into Romantic sceptics.8 Thus, Lord Byron made the narrator of his satirical epic Don Juan (1819–1824) – written in the wake of the dynamically updated and sceptically modernized Classical Tradition – oppose experience to the wisely foolish optimism of such school philosophers as Socrates, Christ, Bacon, and Locke: ’Tis thus the good will amiably err And eke the wise, as has been often shown. Experience is the chief philosopher, But saddest when his science is well known: And persecuted sages teach the schools Their folly in forgetting there are fools.9

In the light of experience, the theological virtues of love, hope, and charity as taught by Christ have forever remained remote ideals. This extreme doubt and disorientation is typical of the “poetry of disillusionment”, in which the “characteristics of high Romantic poetry are all to be found […] but the positive goals are persistently inverted”.10 On his life journey back to an imagined 6 Aleida Assmann, Wordsworth und die romantische Krise: Das Kind als Vater, in Das Vaterbild im Abendland, 2, ed. Hubertus Tellenbach, Stuttgart 1978, 48–61. 7 For the characteristic clashing of spiritual ideals and earthly realities in Romantic literature see Allan Rodway, The Romantic Conflict, London 1963. 8 Merton M. Sealts, Pursuing Melville, 1940–1980, Melville and the Platonic Tradition, Madison WI 1982, and Mark Anderson, Moby-Dick as Philosophy : Plato – Melville – Nietzsche, Nashville TN 2015. In his numerous references to Socrates and Plato, “Melville repeatedly employs the language of philosophical idealism […] but without endorsing Platonic doctrine itself” (Sealts 290). 9 Byron, Don Juan, 1819–1824, 15. 17. 3–8, in Complete Poetical Works, ed. J.J. McGann, Oxford 1980–1993, V. 593–594. All subsequent quotations from Byron’s poetical works are from this edition. 10 Fiona J. Stafford, The Last of The Race, Oxford 1994, 167.

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Paradise or Platonic world of ideas, or his life odyssey back to a mythical Ithaca, “exiled man” in his Romantic nostalgia (Heimweh, Sehnsucht, Wanderlust) “wanders on and on, unconsoled by the journey home, and denied reunion with his race”.11 The Romantic Disillusionists could not share the Positive Romantic hope, still maintained by Blake and Schiller, that the fragmentation of mankind into races, classes, cultures, and religions as well as the increasing isolation of the individual would one day be overcome through art in a saving reintegration.12 Emily Bront[, the sceptical daughter of the perpetual curate of Haworth in Yorkshire, wrote a hymn-like poem on hope which, however, treats it as being baffled by experience. Confined in a “grated den”, her speaker meets Hope (or Spes) as a reserved, cowardly, treacherous, and sadistic female guard who tortures rather than comforts the sufferer. She never really enters the speaker’s prison. And, when most needed, she escapes to heaven and leaves her charge behind, forever unprotected in the reality of this godless world: Hope – whose whisper would have given Balm to all that frenzied pain – Stretched her wings and soared to heaven – Went – and ne’er returned again!13

If we read the prison as modern man’s isolation after the loss of his religious community, it is the experience of the failure of mutually true love that haunts Emily Bront[’s poems, be they biographical self-constitutions or Gondal fictions. Hopes and dreams of lasting happiness collapse as solitary man grows aware of the corruption in all men’s minds, including his or her own: First melted off the hope of youth, Then Fanceys rainbow fast withdrew And then experience told me truth in mortal bosom never grew.14

Experience was, in fact, the chief philosopher of the Romantic Disillusionists, as it had been to the Enlightenment empiricists. The Classical Tradition’s cult of common sense as understood by the seventeeth- and eighteenth-century Augustans appealed to them. Its prevalent Enlightenment optimism and Augustan demand for a system of rational literary rules and conventional political and moral order, however, and its distrust of innovation, upset them. With the Positive as well as the Negative Romantics, the Classical Tradition’s afore11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 161–162. Stafford’s reference is to Friedrich Schiller’s philosophical treatise Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, 6th letter (1795). 13 E. Bront[, Hope, MS 18 December 1843, lines 17–20, in: Poems, ed. D. Roper, Oxford 1995, 142–143. 14 E. Bront[, I Am The Only Being, MS 17 May 1839, lines 17–20, ed. cit. 80.

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13

mentioned hegemonic Alleingültigkeitsanspruch was unanimously challenged, though for divergent reasons. And the pugnacious and chameleon-like Lord Byron, steeped in – though partially critical of – the Classical Tradition, was the most outstanding literary figure and the major literary influence in European Romantic Disillusionism. It was Marguerite, Countess of Blessington who, in her record of her conversations with Lord Byron, represented him as a highly impressionable poet who loved to read Virgil and Pope alongside James Beattie and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “a perfect chameleon […] owing to the extreme mobilit8 of his nature”.15 Chameleon Byron was often accused of plagiarism due to his versatility and fortune to be endowed with such a good memory, at least before critical theory developed the concept of intertextuality.16 Owing to the heritage of Preromanticism, however, he was by no means the only Romantic poet who could write in both the Neoclassical and the Romantic modes. In his brilliant essay entitled “Romanticism”, first published in Macmillan’s Magazine (November 1876) and republished as “Postscript” to his Appreciations (1889), Walter Pater said of Rousseau, a spirit whom Byron thought akin to himself: It is in the terrible tragedy of Rousseau, in fact, that French romanticism, with much else, begins: reading his Confessions we seem actually to assist at the birth of this new, strong spirit in the French mind. […] His strangeness or distortion, his profound subjectivity, his passionateness – the cor laceratum – Rousseau makes all men in love with these. […] For Rousseau did but anticipate a trouble in the spirit of the whole world; and thirty years afterwards, what in him was a peculiarity, became part of the general consciousness. A storm was coming: Rousseau, with others, felt it in the air, and they helped to bring it down: they introduced a disturbing element into French literature, then so trim and formal […]17

Here Rousseau, the “father of French Romanticism”, is not charged with having sparked off the movement alone out of his own “torn heart”. While stressing his fractured and tortured personality, as well as his fascinating literary qualities, Pater nevertheless insists that Rousseau was one of many voices of early Romanticism to rebel against the established dictates of Neoclassical rules as well as philosophical and political reason. He was, though unadmittedly, a Platonist who contributed to the Preromantic Platonic Revival, directing his times’ focus on the regression of civilization back to original nature close to the world of ideas.18 He became the exponent of a whole, long, many-voiced movement, although each 15 Blessington, Conversations of Lord Byron, 1834, ed. Ernest James Lovell, Princeton NJ 1969, 71. 16 Richard Lee Townsend, Lord Byron as Literary Chameleon: A Study in Literary Influence, PhD thesis, University of Michigan microfilm 1971, 8, for echoes of Pope 53–70. 17 Pater, Appreciations, Postscript, 1889, in Works, London 1900–1901, V. 251–252. 18 David Lay Williams, Rousseau’s Platonic Enlightenment, University Park 2007.

14

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involved author had his or her own very distinctive characteristics of thought and style. As with all those authors, conditions of production and reception were essential to Rousseau’s communicative act with his readers. Much the same is true of Lord Byron, who shared Rousseau’s Gothic feeling of being helplessly exposed to a dark fate, without the redemptive powers of selfdetermination or self-control.19 While Byron’s very particular and individual cor laceratum can hardly be denied, he was the major cultural voice in the chorus, not the originator, of the multifaceted literary phenomenon that has been variously called Byronism, Negative Romanticism, Romantic Pyrrhonism, Romantic Scepticism, romantischer Desillusionismus, or – restricted to Romanticism’s dark underside featuring blatant violations of social and moral order – Romantic Agony, Dark Romanticism, schwarze Romantik, romanticismo nero, romanticismo oscuro, soleil noir, and romantisme fr8n8tique.20 The Gothic was Romanticism’s transgressive doppelganger from its Preromantic beginnings with the poetry and prose of the Graveyard School in the 1740s as it subverted both the earlier Enlightenment’s and later Platonic Romanticism’s optimism by recalling attention to and exploring man’s ever-present dark unconscious and its everlasting enmity to clear reason and progress. As such, it had to defend itself against imputations of qualitative cheapness to serve the taste of the uneducated masses for mere lucre, – a favourite traditionalist argument in the period’s Streitkultur.21 The darkening of the Enlightenment, caused by increasing doubt of the omnipotence of human reason and the perfectibility of man,22 preceded a Janus-faced Romanticism so that it has remained a matter of debate whether Heinrich von Kleist and Lord Byron were rather disillusioned Enlightenment or disillusioned Romantic authors. Contemporaries of the Romantic Movement were aware of this duality. Visiting England in 1789, the German Radical naturalist and traveller Georg Forster found that the work of Henry Fuseli was not merely aiming at sensational effects in the interest of sales figures, but was also searching for the truth of nature in its most terrible expression, as the flights of his fancy did not lead his audience into the fairy-land of the ideal but into the forbidden region of ghosts and spectres.23 As a “Jacobin” seeking to break political as well as aesthetic conventions, Forster advocated for the Gothic versus 19 Maggie Kilgour, The Rise of the Gothic Novel, London and New York 1995, 1997, 41–42. 20 As defined by G.R. Thompson; see Thompson (ed.), The Gothic Imagination: Essays on Dark Romanticism, Pullman WA 1974. This does not yet apply to the Graveyard School. 21 Michael Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic, Cambridge 2000, 163–165. 22 Howard Mumford Jones, Revolution and Romanticism, chapter 4, Cambridge MA and London 1974, 57–80. 23 Georg Forster, Geschichte der Kunst in England: Vom Jahre 1789, in: Felix Krämer (ed.), Schwarze Romantik von Goya bis Max Ernst, Städel-Museum, Frankfurt am Main, Ostfildern 2012, 76.

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conventional Neoclassicism. The Gothic was subversive, transgressive, antinormative, revolutionary, anarchic, and irrational. With its success seen in the book market, it formed part of the “popular culture” associated with the French Revolution and thus violently opposed by the anti-Jacobins, who supported a Neoclassical “high or polite culture” dominated by rule and reason.24 Understanding Romanticism as the most modern expression of beauty according to the morals of the time – including the sombre beauty of the Dark Romantic painters Francisco Goya, EugHne Delacroix, and Th8odore G8ricault – the poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire expressed his awareness of these two sides, light and dark, heavenly and hellish: “Le romantisme est une gr.ce, c8leste ou infernale, a qui nous devons des stigmates 8ternels”.25 In doubting both the cognitive faculty of general reason and the restriction of reality to daylight and waking consciousness, Preromantic and Romantic novelists, poets, philosophers, and physicians influenced each other in their discovery and exploration of the unconscious. German Idealist philosophers, Coleridge’s favourite Schelling above all, tried to overcome the Kantian split between freedom and (deterministic) nature by a philosophy of the conscious as well as unconscious of the invisible Spirit working in visible nature including man (and the artist in particular).26 The joint activities of idealist speculation and empiric introspection resulted in the foundation of psychoanalysis and psychiatry. David Hume, Horace Walpole, Rousseau, Gibbon, Byron, and other literati exhibited their traumas and split selves.27 The historian Edward Gibbon, for instance, was a convert from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism, a reconvert to Protestantism in Lausanne, and then, after a reading of and personal acquaintance with the French philosophes such as Voltaire, a sceptic of religion in general and Roman Catholicism in particular. He wrote one French and six divergent English versions of his autobiography, each from another point of view as if there were seven Gibbons. His six-volume History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1788), read across Europe, both fascinated and disconcerted his readers for his ever-changing assessments, ironizations, and images of historical personalities so that Emperor Julian the Apostate appears as a mosaic of contradictions. The orientalist and lawyer Sir William Jones, to give 24 Andrew McCann, Cultural Politics in the 1790s: Literature, Radicalism and the Public Sphere, Basingstoke and London 1999, 107–144. 25 Baudelaire, Salon de 1859, in: Œuvres complHtes, ed. Y.-G. le Dantec – Claude Pichois, BibliothHque de la Pl8iade, Paris 1961, 1062. For Baudelaire’s definition of Romanticism see his Salon de 1846. 26 Odo Marquard, Transzendentaler Idealismus, romantische Naturphilosophie, Psychoanalyse, Cologne 1987. 27 Rolf Lessenich, Romanticism and the Exploration of the Unconscious, in: Romantic Explorations, ed. Michael Meyer, Trier 2011, 185–197, and Christa Schönfelder, Wounds and Words: Childhood and Family Trauma in Romantic and Postmodern Fiction, Bielefeld 2013.

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another example, was well aware of (and often ridiculed for) his contradictions: tutor to the aristocracy and colonial officer as judge at the High Court of Calcutta on the one hand, Radical Whig and anti-colonialist on the other ; simultaneously a lover of the literatures of the Western Classical Tradition and of the totally different “primitive and oriental literatures” of the East, all read in the originals. The wild fantasies of the Arabian Nights, which Jones re-translated, impugned the Eurocentric monopoly of the Neoclassical canon, just as the Enlightenment cult of daylight was challenged by a Preromantic and Romantic cult of night, in literature, art, and science. Edward Young wrote his Graveyard School poem Night Thoughts (1742–1745), and Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert his Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaften (1808) and Die Symbolik des Traumes (1814). As in Goya’s Gothic Los Caprichos design of 1797–1799, the sleep of reason produced monsters (“El sueÇo de la razjn produce monstruos”).28 Poets, painters, philosophers, and scientists probed deep into their individual minds and discovered a paradox there: the simultaneity of both angst and fascination when confronted with the uncanny sublime – be it a huge mountain, a dark cavern, a criminal, a vampire, or a fatal demon lover. The heroine of the seduction novel, along with its authors and readers, was magically attracted by the demon lover’s dark secret, be it a Byronic hero or one of his descendants, Charlotte Bront[’s Rochester or Emily Bront[’s Heathcliff. “The Romantics, those poets who always admired the view from the eyes of the child, were everywhere mesmerized by the villain, by strangeness in beauty, by the corrupt, the contaminated, the imperiled”.29 The sheer proliferation of so many new experimental methods and private institutions for the treatment of mental patients in the Romantic Period – serious like that of Dr Esprit Sylvestre Blanche or fraudulent like that of Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg and Count Cagliostro – reveals the extent to which loss of orientation and doubt of one’s identity could unbalance the minds of sensitive intellectuals.30 There is a strong element of madness in the Byronic heroes, whose balance of mind, goodness, and virtue are corrupted by repeated disillusionments, succeeding the villains of the Radical rather than the Gothic novel. With the enormity of his suffering, these overarching figures make visible the condition of all mankind, as in the case of Conrad the Corsair : His heart was formed for softness – warped to wrong; Betrayed too early, and beguiled too long; 28 Felix Krämer (ed.), Schwarze Romantik von Goya bis Max Ernst, 62. 29 Deborah Lutz, The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative, Columbus OH 2006, 29. 30 For the history of treatment in mental hospitals see Heinz Schott – Rainer Tölle, Geschichte der Psychiatrie, Munich 2006, 252–279.

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Each feeling pure – as falls the dropping dew Within the grot – like that had hardened too; Less clear, perchance, its earthly trials passed, But sunk, and chilled, and petrified at last.31

It has been observed that the Byronic hero is covertly bisexual, and that Byron himself was unsure whether his penchant for same-sex love was a symptom of genius or madness. The Byronic hero is only in love with women when they are absent or dead, and he loves the company of boys (Conrad and Gonsalvo) or women disguised as boys (Conrad and Gulnare alias Kaled).32 This adds to the Byronic hero’s suffering from social discrimination as it did to Byron’s own. His half-sister Augusta, who knew of his love of adolescent boys and clung to the theory of his insanity as much as his divorced wife Annabella, attested to his fear of madness in one of her letters to Annabella: “It is the only point on which he is afraid – ‘qui le fait trembler jusqu’au fond de l’ame’”.33 After the success of the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812), Byron’s work became famous all over Europe. It featured his first Byronic hero, a sceptical and melancholy young man grown old and exhausted before his time, promiscuous and covertly bisexual in his past love affairs, disorientated and cut off from belief in a benevolent God and divine Providence – in short, disillusioned by personal experience. It gave prominent expression to a manyvoiced movement already long underway in the wake of Enlightenment scepticism. The logocentricity of the Enlightenment concept of reason had divorced it from theology and metaphysics in particular, until reintegrated in Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781, 1787). The Cartesian dualism of spirit and matter had postulated two separate ontological entities. Plato and Platonism offered themselves as a path to overcome that dualism. This led to the Romantic revaluation of Platonism against Empiricism: Romantic Platonism could conceive empirical nature as an ensemble of Emersonian symbols that the creative imagination could reattach to the mind and the world of ideas – Einbildung as Wiederineinsbildung, which Coleridge translated as “esemplasy”34 and which William Blake formulated in the famous lines of his Auguries of Innocence (MS ca 1805), under the influence of Thomas Taylor whom he read and possibly met in the house of his artist-colleague John Flaxman: 31 Byron, The Corsair, 1814, 3. 23. 662–667. 32 Peter Cochran (ed.), Byron and Women (and Men), Introduction: The Bisexual Byron, Newcastle upon Tyne 2010, XLIV–L. 33 Malcolm Elwin, Lord Byron’s Family : Annabella, Ada, and Augusta 1816–1824, edited from the author’s typescript by Peter Thomson, London 1975, 30. 34 Nicholas Halmi, The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol, Oxford 2007, passim.

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To see a world in a grain of sand And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour.35

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s concept of religious “speculation” as the cognitive “eye of the mind” may be read in this context of overcoming Enlightenment dualism. Once de-theologized Enlightenment reason had established the doubt, however, the erosion of certainties and the consequent metaphysical homelessness were destined to both coexist with and subvert Romantic Platonism, as well as contribute to what a philosopher of modernity has called the great occidental event of Sinnverfinsterung.36 Enlightenment reason divorced from theology had become subject to its own critique, as in the philosophy of Kant. The initial optimism of the Enlightenment had gradually been darkened with rising doubts about the general sovereignty of reason and man’s autonomy in shaping his future. Nourished by the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 that triggered Voltaire’s anti-Leibnizian novel Candide (1759), Enlightenment pessimism became the Enlightenment’s Other, “firmly rooted in the thought of the age”,37 just as Romantic Disillusionism was Positive Romanticism’s dark underside. There is a gap between Descartes and Spinoza and Leibniz at the beginning of the Enlightenment, and Hume and Kant in its further course. The loss of theological and metaphysical certainties made Europeans more and more aware of the manifest construction of their norms and values, with the effect that the modern subject, individuality, and perspectivism came into anthropological focus. In the Romantic Period then, the “humanities” of the arts faculties of European universities assumed their modern function of continually adapting unstable norms and values as well as reading texts for modern needs. Philosophy, as distinct from the exact sciences, shifted its perspective to focus on how man was conceived in his historicity instead of metaphysical fixity.38 Even the most representative and canonical texts of the mid eighteenth-century Enlightenment evince a layer of doubt below the surface of the praise of autonomous man’s sovereign general reason, tolerance, and progress. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s drama Nathan der Weise (1779), for instance, projects the solution of all problems between Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the Holy Land into a utopia that blatantly offends against the Neoclassical rule of probability. Not only are the 35 William Blake, Auguries of Innocence, Pickering Manuscript, MS ca 1805, in Complete Poems, ed. W.H. Stevenson, Longman Annotated English Poets, 3rd edn. London, 2007, 612. 36 Manfred Frank, Gott im Exil, Frankfurt am Main 1988, 20. 37 Henry Vyverberg, Historical Pessimism in the French Enlightenment, Cambridge MA 1958, 231. 38 Paul Geyer, Die Entdeckung des modernen Subjekts: Anthropologie von Descartes bis Rousseau, Würzburg 1997, 2007, 261.

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play’s plot and d8nouement overwrought so as to undercut the practicality of its rationalist and progressivist message; its titular hero, Nathan the wise and benevolent old Jew, can also be read as a rational ancien-r8gime paterfamilias and tyrant who abuses reason and humanitarianism to enforce his will upon all others. In their Dialektik der Aufklärung (1944), Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno argue that the Enlightenment produced its own antithesis, a return from rationality to myth and from the subjection of nature under the control of sovereign man to the subjection of man under brutal nature.39 From this perspective, Negative Romanticism – including the Gothic – was the unexpected and undesired side effect of the Enlightenment. Reading the Marquis de Sade as a philosopher of the French Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno draw attention to his negative anthropology as exposed at the outset of his novel Justine ou les malheurs de la vertu (1791), his perversion of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, or, Virtue Rewarded (1740–1741) – a concept of man as a “malheureux individu bipHde” badly constructed by a sadistic creator, or spiritus malignus, also to be found in Negative Romanticism.40 One might add Mary Shelley’s tale of Victor Frankenstein, who has an enlightened view of human society perfected by a new race, but finds his creature turn into a “Monster”.41 And one might further add an allegorical reading of “The Haunted Palace”, the poem included in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), which begins with a picture of a radiant palace ruled by “the monarch Thought”, a symbol of the Enlightenment, and ends with the return of the expelled ghosts and the slow decay of that same palace, a symbol of the Enlightenment’s dark eroding undercurrent. If we classify the novels of the Marquis de Sade as being written by a sceptical Enlightenment philosopher we should, however, keep in mind his debt to Romanticism and the dark, subversive Gothic novel and tale, even without the Gothic supernatural along with the Sadean individual’s role as a Romantic solitary and pre-Byronic hero. Here, the Gothic in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sense of the irrational, the irregular, the barbarous, the diverse, the perverse, and the monstrous42 had become a constituent of human nature, including the recently explored human unconscious with its disquieting illogicality and heterogeneity. In its regression to a state of undifferentiation, the Gothic (and the Sadean Gothic in particular) perverted the Positive Romantic 39 Ibid. 4–6, 136. 40 de Sade, Justine ou les malheurs de la vertu, in: Œuvres, ed. Michel Delon, BibliothHque de la Pl8iade, Paris 1990–1998, II. 131. 41 Nicola Trott, Gothic, in: Nicholas Roe (ed.), Romanticism: An Oxford Guide, Oxford 2005, 486. 42 Josef Haslag, “Gothic” im siebzehnten und achtzehnten Jahrhundert, Cologne and Graz 1963, passim.

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ideal of man’s return to a union with nature into promiscuity, universal prostitution, and natural disorder.43 In 1843 Sainte-Beuve observed that the two presiding geniuses of Romanticism were Byron and Sade.44 There is a close kinship between the hypocritically pious monastery of flagellant friars in Sade’s Les infortunes de la vertu (MS 1787) and the hypocritically pious monasteries of Ambrosio and the Abbess in Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk (1796). The difference is that, in the case of Lewis’s Gothic novel, vice is confirmed as such and ultimately punished. In both novels, however, we glimpse rot and torture chambers just below surfaces of decency in a “universe that is indifferent or hostile to human purposes, where humans prey upon one another, and in which the finest impulses only betray us to horror and destruction”.45 This tradition of Sadean immoral narrative was carried on by P8trus Borel in his scandalous Champavert (1833). This collection’s six “contes immoraux”, including the tale of the old anatomist Vesalius who furiously drags his faithless young wife Maria from the splendid chambers of his gorgeous mansion to his subterranean laboratory where he coldly dissects her body, reveals the Gothic view of man as a ferocious animal hidden below a veneer of cultivation and respectability. “Le lycanthrope” was the nickname that Borel, a member of the rebellious JeunesFrance with their cult of Byronic dandy poses, defiantly and proudly adopted from his conservative critics as a confession of his anthropological and moral scepticism. Here, again, the failure of revolutionary expectations (now the failure of the July Revolution of 1830) cast doubt on the traditional doctrine of man’s divine origin and historical destiny, the fixity of his moral law, and his capacity for understanding truth beneath the surface of things. As a poet and novelist, Borel provided a link between English Gothic fiction (Charles Robert Maturin in particular), the Marquis de Sade, and Charles Baudelaire, who held Borel’s work in high esteem. Romantic Disillusionism linked in with Enlightenment scepticism. It increasingly expressed the theological and political disillusion of its time notwithstanding its expanding scientific discovery ; disbelieved the progress of civilization and the redemptive power of the Romantic imagination; and protested against official rule, political correctness, and public doctrine, placing the liberated individual in its stead. It negotiated Platonic foundationalism with Pyrrhonian scepticism, increasingly to the detriment of Positive Romanticism. This is mirrored in Byron’s whole opus of poems, dramas, letters, and journals. Bertrand Russell correctly observes that Byron was “more influential on the 43 Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy : The Literature of Subversion, London 1981, 72–76. 44 David Coward in the Introduction to his English translation of de Sade, The Misfortunes of Virtue, MS 1787, World’s Classics, Oxford 1992, 1999, XXII. 45 David S. Miall, Gothic Fiction, in: Duncan Wu (ed.), A Companion to Romanticism, Oxford 1998, 353.

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Continent than in England”, and David Nokes adds that “Byron had a radical effect in transforming consciousness in post-Napoleonic Europe”.46 However, to depersonalize Byron, to declare his very individual psyche and biography irrelevant as T.A. Hoagwood does in his otherwise very illuminating study of Byron’s scepticism, overshoots the Poststructuralist mark.47 By contrast, E.A. Bernhard Jackson’s study of Byron the sceptical philosopher, though basically inimical to a biographical approach, admits that an understanding of Byron’s literary works and developing philosophy cannot be altogether separated from his life experience, let alone from his reading of sceptical philosophers of the Enlightenment.48 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–1818), for instance, can only be fully understood in the context of Byron’s divorce, exile, and the consequent need to fashion a new self and a new life for himself.49 And Anthony Howe – who examines Byron’s scepticism in the Classical Tradition from Arcesilaus of Pitane, Pyrrho of Elis, Sextus Empiricus, Montaigne, Pierre Bayle, and Hume – also insists on Byron’s life experience, although he contests the previous theory of a development of Byron’s philosophy as frame for his poetry.50 Many texts by numerous other authors with comparable life experiences and sceptical world views, of various literary quality and influence, could be related to Byron’s texts, be it only to prove that doubt and disillusionment had existed under the surface of Positive Romanticism before Byron began to write. Yet every text had its author’s own distinctive voice, notoriety, and quality. There is no such thing as a democracy of texts and common egalitarian body of 8criture. Byron’s admirer Alfred de Musset, for example, had a life experience and poetic voice very distinct from Byron’s, and thus gave his own unmistakeable expression to Romantic Disillusionism’s general awareness that the heritage of the Enlightenment, doubt without a substitute for lost faith, matured into the Romantic Period and undermined Romantic Platonism. This was Musset’s chief explanation for his mal du siHcle. It is the cause of the tragic fate of Jacques Rolla, the eponymous Byronic hero of Musset’s Pyrrhonian verse tale, who finds no other aim in life but to burn his candle at both ends; he dissipates his fortune and wastes his life in drink, love, and gambling due to a shattered traditional morality. The end sees Rolla’s active suicide in the bed of a prostitute, a modern variation of the tragic motif of Liebeslager und Totenbett:

46 Nokes, review of Richard Cardwell (ed.), The Reception of Byron in Europe, London 2004, in TLS, 5370, 3 March 2006, 26. 47 Hoagwood, Byron’s Dialectic: Scepticism and the Critique of Culture, Lewisburg PA 1993. 48 Emily A. Bernhard Jackson, The Development of Byron’s Philosophy of Knowledge: Certain in Uncertainty, Basingstoke 2010, 9. 49 Ibid. 102. 50 Anthony Howe, Byron and the Forms of Thought, Liverpool 2013, 15–42.

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Dors-tu content, Voltaire, et ton hideux sourire Voltige-t-il encor sur tes os d8charn8s? Ton siHcle 8tait, dit-on, trop jeune pour te lire; Le nitre doit te plaire, et tes hommes sont n8s. Il est tomb8 sur nous, cet 8difice immense Que de tes larges mains tu sapais nuit et jour.51

Romantic Philhellenism may serve as another example of faith being progressively undermined by doubt. Philhellenism had been a strong movement, manifesting itself in many different voices and cultural forms long before Byron espoused it in 1823, dying for it a year later. He gave the cause an unprecedented impetus, famous stanzas, a name, and a myth ensuring its first partial success in 1830, although his scepticism doubted the possibility of any historical progress. He was thus the figurehead of a popular movement, though not in the positive sense of Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841). Romantic Philhellenism saw Greece fall from Turkish control to that of the ancien r8gime, which had Otto of Bavaria crowned king in order to prevent the rise of a Greek democracy. After all, it was Carlyle who identified Byronism with Scepticism or Pyrrhonism when, in 1831, he diagnosed self-conscious doubt as the chief disease of his time and demanded a practical dialectic, Victorian rather than Romantic. Doubt must produce a new faith and new social commitment – the Victorian work ethic, based on a new vital belief in God, progress, and a malleable, improved future by successfully breaking the circles of history. The nihil sub sole novum of the Classical Tradition and the Old Testament Book of Koheleth, which Romantic Disillusionism had revived in sceptical opposition to eighteenth-century progressivism, had to be overcome: Our whole relations to the Universe and to our fellow-man have become an Inquiry, a Doubt […] Belief, Faith has well-nigh vanished from the world. […] For young Valour and Thirst of Action no ideal Chivalry invites to heroism, prescribes what is heroic; the old ideal of Manhood has grown obsolete, and the new is still invisible to us, and we grope after it in darkness, one clutching this phantom, another that; Werterism, Byronism, even Brummelism, each has its day. […] Behold a Byron, in melodious tones, ‘cursing his day’: he mistakes earth-born passionate Desire for heaven-inspired Freewill; without heavenly load-star, rushes madly into the dance of meteoric lights that hover on the mad Mahlstrom; and goes down among its eddies. […] Launched into a dark shoreless sea of Pyrrhonism, what would remain for us but to sail aimless, hopeless; or make madly merry, while the devouring Death had not yet ingulfed us?

51 Musset, Rolla, 1833, 4. 1–6, in: Po8sies complHtes, ed. Maurice Allem, BibliothHque de la Pl8iade, Paris 1957, 283–284.

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[…] The fever of Scepticism must needs burn itself out, and burn out thereby the Impurities that caused it; then again will there be clearness, health.52

Three years later, Sir Henry Taylor, whom Byron’s poetry had fascinated a young man, rose in similar opposition against literary Byronism, denigrating it as a short-lived fashionable pose of misanthropy and doubt in the “Preface” to his dramatic romance Philip van Artevelde (1834). Taylor blamed Byron’s philosophically deficient “knowledge of human nature which is exclusive of what is good”,53 and he portrayed his own fourteenth-century Flemish national hero in conscious opposition to the Byronic hero. John Stuart Mill had a similar literary experience. Passing his life in review in his Autobiography (MSS 1861 and 1871, posth. 1873), Mill remembered how the fashionable reading of Byron with his passionate, self-centred heroes had aggravated his early suicidal depression and the subsequent reading of Wordsworth in the autumn of 1828 had alleviated it. Carlyle, Taylor, and Mill had good reason to complain that Byronic Pyrrhonism was still going strong. Byron’s emulator Philip James Bailey characterized the titular hero of his 40.000 line dramatic poem Festus (1839, 1845) on the combined model of Byron’s Manfred and Goethe’s Faust, whom Byron had read as a Byronic hero notwithstanding the character’s advanced age and final repentance and salvation. Festus, Bailey’s Byronic hero-poet, endures a dialectical career of doubt, despair, disdain of mankind, and crime before his final conversion. Yet Festus’s recovery of faith and mankind’s universal redemption are hardly credible, and Bailey’s readers and critics enjoyed the poem for its Byronism and un-Victorian Spasmodism rather than its strained, superadded and lengthily commented orthodox Christianity.54 The work, as its contemporary critic William Edmonstoune Aytoun correctly remarked, subverts its own proclaimed doctrine. The Byronic hero, of whom Manfred is the extremest manifestation, is in search of an identity after the loss of his metaphysical foundation, a solipsist that sees the world as a mere projection of himself55 and thus shows the dark side and ultimate failure of Romantic individualism and perspectivism, a self-conscious Kantian or Wordsworthian or, more radically, Fichtean ego that half perceives and half creates the world as the non-ego (subjective idealism). He lives “in a world in which the solid ground offered to the traditional hero has been cut away, leaving merely self-assertion, self-crea52 Carlyle, Characteristics, 1831, in: Works, Centenary Edition, ed. H.D. Traill, London 1896– 1899, XXVIII. 19–40. 53 Taylor, Philip van Artevelde, Preface, 1834, Boston 1863, 15. 54 Mark A. Weinstein, William Edmonstoune Aytoun and the Spasmodic Controversy, New Haven and London 1968, 66–76. 55 Jochen Ecke, Lord Byron, Manfred, in: Bernhard Reitz (ed.), Das englische Drama und Theater von den Anfängen bis zur Postmoderne, Trier 2016, 186–190.

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tion”,56 in an age of isolated, titanic figures such as Napoleon and Byron himself. Shaping obedient crowds to his solipsistic will like Conrad the Corsair, Byron’s Napoleon is a Byronic hero, hated as a war criminal and enemy of tradition, yet admired as a gifted leader by many Victorians. Bailey’s Festus belongs to the numerous post-Byronic and post-Napoleonic works of Romantic Disillusionism budding below the decent bourgeois surface of the Victorian mainstream, resurging into the Neoromanticism of the Decadence and Fin de SiHcle. Around the same time, Karl Immermann wrote his convoluted modern bildungsroman Die Epigonen (1836)57 featuring a hero infected by his age’s disillusionment and in search of a new aim in life. Hermann’s final success, however, offers no practicable solution as it arrives thanks to the mere contingency of an unexpected inheritance, an immense property on which he settles as a farmer. Some doubt remains; the vision of an impossible and vast millennium is replaced by the vision of a somewhat less impossible Biedermeier idyll, restricted in time and space and pinned down in a concrete framework, much as in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s and Robert Southey’s abortive pantisocracy in Somerset or the equally abortive American Brook Farm experiment as portrayed in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s anti-Transcendentalist Blithedale Romance (1852). Such a Biedermeier idyll had already been subtly satirized in Jean Paul’s humorous novel Leben des Quintus Fixlein (1796), with its Shandyesque mixture of sentiment and ridicule; the latter aimed at the arbitrariness of petty German ancien r8gime princes and the small-scale happiness of the comic hero’s withdrawal into the privacy of a boring paradise. Jean Paul’s previous novel, Leben des vergnügten Schulmeisterlein Maria Wuz in Auenthal (1793), is significantly subtitled “a kind of idyll”, as it is a satire on limitation and Spießertum rather than a Gessnerian idyll. The comic protagonist’s home, a petty principality in the Roman-German Empire, defines his intellectual limitations. Too stupid to make his kitschy Messiade incomprehensible, he makes his manuscript at least unreadable. In his Vorschule der Ästhetik (1804, 1813), Jean Paul subversively defined his view of the idyllic as “Vollglück der Beschränkung”.58 In his later period – from his novella “Des Lebens Überfluss” (1822) to his death in 1853 – Ludwig Tieck treated retirement idylls with similar irony. Heinrich and Clara, romantic lovers from different classes of society persecuted by the ancien r8gime for marrying against the rules of the feudal state, fly from persecution and withdraw into an isolated life in a poor home that they beautify with their imaginations and the reading of Jean Paul. Tieck commented that the irony of idyll-making in a dreary and unjust world is that it does not offer a real solution to the problem in 56 Jeffrey N. Cox (ed.), Seven Gothic Dramas 1789–1825, Introduction, Athens OH 1992, 64. 57 Subtitled Familienmemoiren in neun Büchern aus den Jahren 1823–35. 58 Jean Paul, Vorschule der Ästhetik, 1804, Berlin 1813, 255–256.

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the sense of Paradise Regained, but instead poeticizes what cannot be redeemed: “[…] der tiefste Ernst, der zugleich mit Scherz und wahrer Heiterkeit verbunden ist”.59 Furthermore, we shall see that Franz Grillparzer’s fairy-tale drama Der Traum ein Leben (MS 1817–1834, 1840), often understood as a Biedermeier call to happy retirement from political activity and contentment in privacy, in reality subverted its own politically correct message. Contrary to its popular associations, Biedermeier was not a return to firm faith, an old-aged pensioner’s or repentant former revolutionary’s kitschy idyll, but a doubt- and angst-ridden relocalization. It marked a return from visionary Positive Romanticism to the self-restraint of the Augustan Classical Tradition – from Plato, William Blake, and Percy Bysshe Shelley to Horace, George Crabbe, and Jane Austen – as mirrored in the evolution of Wordsworth’s Prelude (MSS 1797–1850). It was a process of domestication, a return from isolated heresy to dutiful membership of a congregation, from Promethean overreaching to humility, be it genuine or ironic.60 This reintroduction of earthbound realism, or “Welthaftigkeit”, which pointed forward to Victorianism had many expressions.61 It could be Wordsworth’s “despondency corrected”, hiding its remaining doubt; it could be Eduard Mörike’s uneasy retreat into conservatism in search of idylls that ultimately prove troublesome perturbationes domesticae; or, more radically, it could be Felicia Dorothea Hemans’s and Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s conscious ironic subversion, praising traditional dogmas and values so as to discredit them subtly. Mörike’s two-part novel Maler Nolten (MS 1830, 1832), for instance, reveals the dark fatalism and nocturnal side of life below seeming idylls, calling them up repeatedly only to destroy them one after another in a kind of narrative Byronic bubble-pricking technique.62 Covert Biedermeier subversion, we shall see, became the favourite option for women that dared not openly endorse Byron’s male Romantic Disillusionism and sacrilegious Satanism. A recent critic has contended that this renunciation, ironization, and integration of High Romantic individualism into the broader currents of European literature was a largely feminist agenda, cutting Byron’s Corsair down to size.63 Two decades after Immermann, Matthew Arnold echoed Carlyle when he 59 Rudolf Köpke, Ludwig Tieck, Erinnerungen aus dem Leben des Dichters nach dessen mündlichen und schriftlichen Mitteilungen, Leipzig 1855, II. 238. 60 Richard Cronin, Romantic Victorians: English Literature, 1824–1840, Basingstoke 2002, 4. 61 Friedrich Sengle, Biedermeierzeit: Deutsche Literatur im Spannungsfeld zwischen Restauration und Revolution 1815–1845, Stuttgart 1971–1980. Also see Virgil Nemoianu, The Taming of Romanticism: European Literature and the Age of Biedermeier, Cambridge MA 1984, 6. 62 Ulrich Kittstein, Eduard Mörike: Jenseits der Idylle, Darmstatt 2015. 63 Caroline Franklin, The Female Romantics: Nineteenth-Century Women Novelists and Byronism, New York and London 2012, 1, 60–82, and passim.

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identified Byron as Europe’s foremost representative of doubt and despair, a poet whose lyrical confessions of personal pain expressed that of his whole generation without, however, showing the way out of negation and into a new future that was badly needed: What helps it now, that Byron bore, With haughty scorn which mocked the smart, Through Europe to the Ætolian shore, The pageant of his bleeding heart? That thousands counted every groan, And Europe made his woe her own?64

Washington Irving’s article “An Unwritten Drama of Lord Byron”, published in the first edition of The Gift (1836), attests to a similarly voracious reception for whatever Byron wrote (or whatever passed for his) in repressive Jacksonian America: The reading world has, I apprehend, by this time become possessed of nearly every scrap of poetry and romance ever written by Lord Byron. It may be pleased, however, to know something of a dramatic poem which he did not write, but which he projected […]65

The much-debated question of whether Byron’s works really were known to all authors of Byronism is of minor relevance. There was an atmosphere, attitude, myth, and hero-worship of Byron that shaped Romantic Disillusionism. Goethe, who read Byron, overcame the disillusionism of his early Sturm und Drang years. In contrast, the poets in the aforementioned group of Les Jeunes-France (1829–1833), including G8rard de Nerval and P8trus Borel, who all admired Byron, may not even have read his works when they gave their various literary expressions to their mal du siHcle. Byronism in the sense of Negative Romanticism had been well under way even before Byron began to propagate it and make it a great fashion throughout Europe. In each Byronic author Romantic Disillusionism assumed a different tone, mode, and technique. Büchner’s and Grabbe’s dramas differed from Byron’s and from each other ; so did Heine’s and Leopardi’s lyrics. Equally Poe’s tales and lyrics, here read through the eyes of Baudelaire as sceptically subversive of Positive Romanticism, have a quality of their own. The intensity and literary expressions of the Romantic Disillusionism 64 Arnold, Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, 1855, lines 133–138, in: Poems, ed. Kenneth Allott, Longman Annotated English Poets, London 1965, 291. 65 Irving, An Unwritten Drama of Lord Byron, in: The Gift, 1 (1836), Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, I. 166. Irving’s vague information, which he claimed came from Captain Thomas Medwin, about Byron’s plan to adapt an unidentifiable Spanish drama may refer to a possible source of Edgar Allan Poe’s story William Wilson (1839). Poe’s knowledge of Byron and Byronism will be dealt with later.

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of those authors strongly varied with their tempers across a broad scale from Poe’s scepticism to Thomson’s nihilism. However, for all such manifold divergences Romantic Disillusionism had a common core which the present study tries to investigate: the non-dogmatic doubt or dogmatic negation of Paradise Regained. A basic distinction can be made between Positive Platonic Romanticism – belief accompanied by doubt – on the one hand and Romantic Disillusionism – doubt accompanied by attempts at belief or by the awareness of the ineradicability of pious self-deception – on the other. Branwell Bront[’s poem “The Doubter’s Hymn” (MS 1835) is a prime example. It begins by way of Byron’s bubble-pricking, with the dogma of resurrection to immortality and an amalgam of Platonic and Christian commonplaces, including the image of life as a “troubled dream” between the daylight in this world and the daylight of the true world beyond, and ends by doubting all the hymn’s assertions through their inversion: How will that Future seem? What is Eternity? Death the Sleep? – Is Heaven the Dream? Life the reality?66

Ultimately, however, doubt was replaced by dogmatic negation in the sense of metaphysical, existential, epistemological, moral, and political nihilism – a new foundationalism. It must, however, be borne in mind that seeming dogmatic negation could be mere provocation for the sake of spreading doubt, as frequently in the poetical works of Byron. Moreover, Romantic Disillusionism was a seminal movement in literary history which never really declined as Victorianism did. As a dissenting and heretical under and countercurrent to orthodoxy, it accompanied the High Victorian movement, fuelled its inherent and unconquerable doubt, and occasionally emerged in such authors as Emily Bront[ in England and, most influentially, Edgar Allan Poe in America. Even arch-Victorians like Charles Dickens, William Wilkie Collins, and Elizabeth Gaskell commissioned or wrote Dark Romantic ghost stories for such arch-Victorian periodicals as Dickens’s Household Words (1850–1859) and All the Year Round (1859–1870). In succession to the Gothic novel, tale, and drama, they pointed out the shortcomings of Victorian science in dealing with the terrifying and inexplicable, including the dark caverns of the unconscious and the unfathomable abysses of human evil and crime. Leaving the reader suspended between fact and fiction, knowledge and superstition, natural and supernatural explanations, they confirmed and 66 B. Bront[, The Doubter’s Hymn, November 1835, lines 21–24, in: Poems, ed. Victor A. Neufeldt, New York NY and London 1990, 168.

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disseminated doubt of human cognition, divine justice, and a world purpose, much as in the tales of Poe. Dickens himself was a believer in esotericism and mesmerism. With the Pre-Raphaelites – Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, George Meredith, William Morris and others – Romantic Disillusionism re-emerged having metamorphosed into the Neoromanticism of Decadent and Fin-de-SiHcle literature: Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, the Trench Poets of the Great War, etc. In France, the line of succession between the High Romantic and the Neoromantic movement was unbroken, so much that French literary historians tend to call the nineteenth century “le siHcle romantique”. The victory of Positive Romanticism in the battle over the Paris performance of Victor Hugo’s drama Hernani (1830), though forever adulterated by an element of doubt, also paved the way for the Negative Romanticism of Alfred de Musset and G8rard de Nerval, Th8ophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire, Jean Mor8as, Jules Barbey D’Aurevilly and Jules Laforgue, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, and St8phane Mallarm8. Charles Nodier had the irrational excesses of the bataille d’Hernani of 1830 in mind when he coined the term “litt8rature fr8n8tique”, with its debt to the Classical Tradition’s subversive strain of phrenesis and delirium that the Augustans tended to ignore as well as his own involvement in the English Gothic tradition.67 Thus, Positive Romantic visions were subject to doubt by both Neoclassical critics of Romanticism and by Romantic Disillusionists;68 and Romantics were often border crossers, moving up and down the large scale between Plato and Pyrrho, the Apollonian and the Dionysian. In the preface to his verse drama Les burgraves (1843), Victor Hugo, though basically a Romantic Platonist, found it difficult to maintain his Platonic vision of a future worldwide humanity without barbarity, “avoir pour patrie le monde et pour nation l’humanit8”.69 The exaltedness of his rhetoric betrays his misgivings when confronting the decade’s enormous social problems and misery. When Hugo wrote Les burgraves, Heinrich Heine, for instance, had just derided Positive Romanticism and its prophetic visions in Atta Troll (MS 1841, 1843), displaying them as mere vehicles for satire and libel, and illustrated his Romantic Disillusionism in the symbolism of his verse epic’s landscape, which changes from sublime and rich to trivial and poor. Viewed from afar, the mountain peaks of the Pyrenees glitter in the sun as if adorned with gold and 67 Francesco Manzini, Frenetic Romanticism, in: The Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism, ed. Paul Hamilton, Oxford 2016, 140–162. 68 Rolf Lessenich, Neoclassical Satire and the Romantic School 1780–1830, 355–376. 69 Hugo, Les burgraves, Pr8face, 1843, in: Th8.tre complet, ed. J.-J. Thierry – Josette M8lHse, Pditions de la Pl8iade, Paris 1963–64, II. 21. For French Romantic Platonism including Hugo’s see also Michel Brix, Platon et le platonisme dans la litt8rature franÅaise de l’.ge romantique, 43–60.

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purple, but once approached they are shown to be nothing but quickly melting snow and stupid ennui: Aber in der Nähe schwindet Diese Pracht, und wie bei andern Irdischen Erhabenheiten Täuschen dich die Lichteffekte. Was dir Gold und Purpur dünkte, Ach, das ist nur eitel Schnee, Eitel Schnee, der blöd und kläglich In der Einsamkeit sich langweilt.70

The very fact that Heine’s great paragon Byron was “felt to be mad, bad, and dangerous to know” throughout nineteenth-century Europe, as well as “the greatest threat to the country’s morals and social order”, a poet whom both the political and poetical establishment tried to silence, raised him to the position of Prometheus or Satan in the chaotic, crowded, and many-voiced Pandemonium of Negative Romanticism, a model for such “Satanic” poets as Baudelaire.71 Byron was, more or less directly, a major source of influence in Romantic Disillusionism across Europe, at least with regard to its more and more prevalent world view if not to the multiplying techniques of negation. Even some of his traditionalist critics had to admit (and admire) Byron’s sense of the zeitgeist, although their major strategy of attack usually consisted in denying Byron the truth of his sufferings and denigrating him as a mere sentimental impostor. This followed the view of Aleksandr Pushkin, who overcame his initial admiration for Byron with the narrator of his verse novel Evgeny Onegin (1825–1833), portraying his aristocratic hero, the satiated Childe-Harold-like “superfluous man” (\Yi^YZ hV\_S8[), as an actor of fashionable poses. Onegin simultaneously commanded Pushkin’s and his readers’ sympathy and antipathy. This ambiguity of admiration and rejection also explains the admiring tribute in the Romantic Platonist Alphonse de Lamartine’s appeal to Byron to return to humility and orthodoxy, and to the consolations of religious faith – a pattern that recurred in Pierre-Jean de B8ranger’s poem to Borel on the occasion of Borel’s scandalous Byronic Rhapsodies (1831): Roi des chants immortels, reconnais-toi toi-mÞme! Laisse aux fils de la nuit le doute et le blasphHme.72

70 Heine, Atta Troll: Ein Sommernachtstraum, caput 16, stanzas 2 and 3, in: Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Klaus Briegleb, Munich 1975–1976, IV. 532. 71 J.J. McGann, Byron and Romanticism, ed. J. Soderholm, Cambridge 2002, 113–114. McGann repeatedly stresses Baudelaire’s enormous debt to Byron. 72 Lamartine, M8ditations po8tiques, L’homme: f Lord Byron, 1820, in: Œuvres po8tiques

30

The Two Sides of Romanticism

When Alfred de Musset composed his “Lettre / M. de Lamartine” (1836), trying to convince his fellow poet of his kinship with the suffering Byron whose blasphemous scepticism he had criticized, Alfred’s brother Paul encouraged him by confirming “que l’Europe entiHre s’int8ressait / la douleur”.73 Byron’s success across Europe was due to a universal mood of disillusionment. Alphonse de Lamartine and Alfred de Vigny may stand for the critics, Musset for the wholehearted admirers of that “prince des proscrits”, “sublime orgueuilleux”, and “dieu”, almighty creator of “sauvages concerts”.74 In Musset’s view Lamartine, who had read The Corsair, Lara, and Manfred, must have felt Byron’s suffering and mal du siHcle to be his own, because intense suffering is the precondition for all intensely good poetry : Vous appelliez de loin cette .me d8sol8e; Pour grand qu’il vous par0t, vous le sientiez ami, Et, comme le torrent dans la verte vall8e, L’8cho de son g8nie en vous avait g8mi.75

Occasional glances at such later manifestations of Byronism show not only Byron’s legacy but also that of the literature of negation and disillusion in general – the early genealogy of what has come to be called the Literature of the Absurd, as manifested in the Theatre of the Absurd.76 Literary historians and sociologists have pointed out that the 1820s and 1830s witnessed a change of paradigms, from dreams of the past and visions of the future to the short-lived present moment, a change evident in Byron’s later works as well as in Baudelaire’s preModern aesthetics of the present and the momentary, contingencies which defied all systems.77 Romantic Disillusionism’s denial of Platonic idealism, especially of jakoj!cah_a, was destined to become one of the characteristics of Modernism’s artistic programme of irritating, incomprehensible, and shocking alienation.78

73 74 75 76 77 78

complHtes, ed. Guyard, BibliothHque de la Pl8iade, Paris 1963, 11. For the Platonism of Lamartine and Vigny see Marc Citoleux, Alfred de Vigny : Persistances classiques et 8trangHres, Paris 1924, 502–503. See Maurice Allem’s commentary in his edition of Musset, Po8sies complHtes, 753. Musset, Lettre / M. de Lamartine, 1 March 1836, ibid. 328–334. Ibid. 328. Norbert Lennartz, Absurdität vor dem Theater des Absurden: Absurde Tendenzen und Paradigmata untersucht an ausgewählten Beispielen von Lord Byron bis T.S. Eliot, Trier 1998. Alexandra Böhm, Byron, Heine, and Musset, in: British and European Romanticisms, ed. Christoph Bode – Sebastian Domsch, Trier 2007, 196–198. Herbert Grabes, Einführung in die Literatur und Kunst der Moderne und Postmoderne, Tübingen and Basel 2004, and Toril Moi, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism, Oxford 2006.

Introduction

When residing in the dreary back rooms of the Casa Saluzzo in Genoa in the autumn of 1822, during his moral exile in Italy, Byron was in a state of deep depression for several reasons.79 Personally, the undigested traumatic experiences of his early childhood and youth that had become a source of his poetical inspiration80 now soured his middle age, which, as a Romantic poet, he identified as his old age. At only 34 years old his hair was growing grey, and his body obese. The handsome youth of yesterday, whom people had called the most attractive man of his time, whom women and ephebes had equally admired and courted, realized that he was in his physical and psychic decline. He had left Pisa and the Pisan Circle of English Liberals and Radicals after the tragic death of his friend Percy Shelley, supporting his impoverished widow Mary Godwin Shelley and his prosecuted publisher John Hunt, editor of The Liberal and brother of his fellow poet Leigh Hunt. Politically, Byron’s hopes for the success of the 1821 Neapolitan uprising against the Bourbons and a risorgimento of Italy had again been dashed. His interest in Armenia, the supposed site of Paradise in the Bible, had shown him how hopelessly the country was squeezed between Persia and Turkey and exposed to Russian expansionism, a paradise forever lost.81 The formerly sociable Byron withdrew into self-imposed isolation, showing strong symptoms of misanthropy in his letters and conversations. Byron had left England for Italy in 1816, the same year in which Ugo Foscolo left Italy for England – neither to return, fated to die abroad. A recent study has exhaustively examined the ways in which long-term exiles shaped the thoughts and writings of Romantic Period poets, evoking precedents of individual or 79 L.A. Marchand, Byron: A Portrait, London 1971, 389–395. 80 K.R. Jamison, Touched with Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, New York 1993, and Rolf Lessenich, Lord Byron and the Nature of Man, Cologne and Vienna 1978, passim. 81 Fiona MacCarthy, Byron: Life and Legend, London 2002, 322. Byron even learned and spoke the Armenian language; Letter to Thomas Moore, 24 December 1816, in Letters and Journals, ed. L.A. Marchand, London 1973–1994, V. 146.

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Introduction

communal exile or isolation: Philoctetes, Dante, the story-tellers in Boccaccio’s Decamerone.82 From 1816 until his death in 1824 Byron’s poetry is dominated by the theme of exile, informed by his suffering of it, incorporating material signs of exclusion and separation.83 For all his occasional scoffing at and contempt for his native country, exile and isolation were traumatic experiences for the literary exiles of his age, be they alone in the backrooms of a Casa Saluzzo or in the company of other exiles in a Pisan Circle. They became disembodied voices, and their legal wrangles and chances of opposing their backbiting critics in the press were even more hopeless than when they had been at home.84 In Italy, Byron also had the displeasure of reading his former amour Lady Caroline Lamb’s (Viscountess Melbourne’s) Gothic novel / clef, Glenarvon, then recently published in 1816 when the vogue for Gothic novels was at its height. It is a fascinating mixture of Gothic conventions, analysis of the age, self-analysis for the purpose of self-therapy, and personal revenge having been jilted after a short, adulterous love-affair in 1812, with a protagonist (Lord Glenarvon – Lord Byron) appearing as a mirror or alter ego of the adulterous heroine (Lady Calantha Avondale – Lady Caroline Lamb). Both have noble visions of political justice joined with disdain of prejudice, just as both have literary genius and brilliance, yet are psychically unbalanced – both are either fallen (Glenarvon) or fall in the course of the novel (Calantha). There is no consistency in their split natures. Ruthven Glenarvon in particular is introduced as a rich, aristocratic rebel and radical who opposes private property and social inequality, yet clings to his possessions and is proud of his titles.85 He has noble visions of justice and honour, yet commits dark crimes and plunges “into all the tumults of dissipation”.86 The depraved, murderous Viviani is Glenarvon’s evil side incarnate, as Stevenson’s Mr Hyde embodies the dark side of Dr Jekyll, while Lord Avondale (with his reversed name) assumes Glenarvon’s good side. The vampiric nature of Ruthven Glenarvon was later sharpened and mirrored in the name of the protagonist Lord Ruthven in John Polidori’s Gothic tale “The Vampyre” (1819), wrongly attributed to the more famous and commercial Lord Byron by Henry Colburn when first published in his New Monthly Magazine. With its insistence on the imagery of falling, failing, and the breaking of principles and logic, the novel may be read as a literary representation of Romantic Disillusionism:

82 Jane Stabler, The Artistry of Exile: Romantic and Victorian Writers in Italy, Cambridge 2013, passim. 83 Ibid. 27. 84 Ibid. 194–222. 85 Caroline Lamb, Glenarvon, 1816, ed. Frances Wilson, Everyman, London 1995, 138. 86 Ibid. 139.

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He [Glenarvon-Byron] gave up his days and nights to every fierce excess; and soon the high spirit of genius was darkened, the lofty feelings of honour were debased, and the frame and character sunk equally dejected under the fatigue of vigils and revels, in which reason and virtue had no share. Intervals of gloom succeeded, till stimulated again, his fallen countenance betrayed a disappointed heart […]87

When, eight years later, the young Edward Bulwer-Lytton met the ageing Caroline Lamb, he found her just as contradictory a mix of vices and virtues as Byron himself. He confided this observation to his autobiographical fragments later published by his son and first biographer Robert: […] viewing Byron then from a point of view no longer obscured by the passions, I think her [Caroline Lamb’s] estimate of him was sound – as a being somewhat akin to herself in strange caprices and wild affectations – spoiled by too early a reputation for other things besides genius – but, on the whole, with many redeeming qualities, lovable and noble.88

In Italy, Byron had the further displeasure of reading Caroline Lamb’s ottava rima parodies of his Don Juan – A New Canto (1819) and Gordon: A Tale (1821), written in the persona of Byron’s chaotic and contradictory narrator. Like his grandfather and father, Robert Bulwer’s son Victor saw Byron’s brilliant caprices and shifting of colours as mirroring Caroline Lamb’s own lack of balance and consistency, tending towards mental derangement.89 The Disillusioned Romantic Byron alternates between contempt of and desire for fame, and shifts from lamenting for to satirical derision of a “mad world”, simultaneously deploring and enjoying his vision of the finality of a doomsday without the promise of regeneration. As in Glenarvon, however, Caroline Lamb does not make up her mind whether Byron (and his speaker) is a true madman or a mere histrionic impostor, just as Annabella Milbanke, Byron’s divorced wife, could not decide whether her husband was “mad or bad”: Blessed they, who wear the vital spirit out Even thus, degrading not the holy fire, Nor bear a prostituted sense about – The misery of never quenched desire (Still quenched, still kindling, every thought devout Lost in the changeful torment – portion dire!) Return we to our heaven, our fire and smoke, Though now you may begin to take the joke!90 87 Ibid. 88 Edward Robert Lytton, The Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of Edward Bulwer, Lord Lytton, London 1883, I. 329. 89 Victor Lytton, The Life of Edward [Robert] Bulwer, First Lord Lytton, London 1913, I. 119. 90 Caroline Lamb, A New Canto, 1819, stanza 24, in: Duncan Wu (ed.), Romanticism: An Anthology, 1rst edition Oxford 1994, 702.

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Introduction

Shortly after Glenarvon, in the year 1817 which was marked by the intense persecution of Radicals like William Hone, Percy Shelley published his Dantesque dream vision The Revolt of Islam, a plea for abiding belief in the dialectics of historical progress, anticipating Prometheus Unbound (1820). The poem’s preface described the disillusion of the times and threatening Byronic despair after the historic failure of visions and hopes – the two sides of Romanticism: The sympathies connected with that event [the French Revolution] extended to every bosom. […] But such a degree of unmingled good was expected as it was impossible to realise. […] The revulsion occasioned by the atrocities of the demagogues and the reestablishment of successive tyrannies in France, was terrible, and felt in the remotest corner of the civilised world. […] Hence gloom and misanthropy have become the characteristics of the age in which we live, the solace of a disappointment that unconsciously finds relief only in the wild exaggeration of its own despair. This influence has tainted the literature of the age with the hopelessness of the minds from which it flows.91

Politically, it was a depressive period following the Congress of Vienna (1814– 1815). After a succession of fruitless hopes, as in the failure of Pascal Paoli’s fight for Corsican independence lamented in James Boswell’s Account of Corsica (1768) and in the failure of Tadeusz Kosciuszko’s fight for Polish independence lamented in Thomas Campbell’s The Pleasures of Hope (1799), the expected millennial progress following on from the French Revolution of 1789 had proved to be wishful thinking. Campbell’s doubt-ridden plea for hope, referring to the intrepidity and successes of Admiral John Byron, the poet’s grandfather, was no longer to be maintained, at least not in this world.92 In Campbell’s later work, Gertrude of Wyoming (1809), prospects for future happiness had darkened. The hopes of millions had been shattered, seemingly for good. Their dreams of liberty, equality, and fraternity had first been drowned in blood by the very French Revolution that had promised their implementation. Then Napoleon, formerly a victorious general in the French revolutionary army, had risen to power and proclaimed himself Emperor, cynically restoring a replica of the old feudal order under the banner of the ideals of the Revolution both in France and its occupied countries. And, finally, after his abdication in Fontainebleau and defeat at Waterloo, the Congress of Vienna had restored the old feudal order across Europe. A prisoner confined, first on the island of Elba and then on the island of Saint Helena, he died in the same year as John Keats, 1821, a year before Percy Shelley, and was laid to rest in an anonymous grave: “Ci G%t”. In 1817, the 91 P.B. Shelley, The Revolt of Islam, Preface, 1817, in: Poetical Works, ed. T. Hutchinson – G. M. Matthews, Oxford Standard Authors, Oxford 1970, 33–34. 92 Thomas Campbell, The Pleasures of Hope, 1799, I. 101–120, in: Complete Poetical Works, ed. J. Logie Robertson, London, 1907, 5.

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21-year-old Princess Charlotte Augusta – the only legitimate child of the Prince of Wales and the hope of the Liberals as a prospective heiress to the throne after her demented grandfather and debauched father – died with a still-born child, being mourned in the final canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1818).93 The forces of the Restoration seemed invincible and Romantic dreams of liberty doomed to be unrealized. The intensity and duration of wars habituated men to violence and intensified the literary discourses of it, gradually replacing sentiment and romance.94 After all the sufferings, initially justified as the unavoidable antithetical prelude to a new millennium, or at least to an improved political order conceding more civilian liberties such as freedom of the press and equal jurisdiction, nothing had changed. On the contrary, everything seemed worse; the secret police more powerful and watchful than ever. Long overdue political and social reforms had first been delayed by the Twenty Years War with France, and then, after the Quadruple Alliance of 1813 (Britain, Russia, Austria, Prussia), by the Holy Alliance (Russia, Austria, Prussia) on the Congress of Vienna (1814– 1815) and the Quintuple Alliance (Britain, Russia, Austria, Prussia, France) on the Congresses of Aachen (1818), Troppau (1820) Laibach (1821), and Verona (1822). This constituted what came to be known as the Concert of Europe, a questionable balance of power that lasted until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. The “Battle of Peterloo” (1819), when the yeomanry quelled a demonstration against the Corn Laws in St Peter’s Field, Manchester, was so called for being a historical consequence of the Battle of Waterloo (1815). There was widespread awareness among nineteenth-century European literati that the success of Byron and Byronism across Europe was due, at least in part, to these disappointed socio-political expectations, as attested by the literary diary of Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1877).95 After the failure of the 1798 uprising in Ireland, Robert Emmet reactivated the United Irish movement and vainly tried to revive French support for the Irish republican cause. However, after a second uprising of the United Irish veterans he was captured, tried for treason, and hanged in 1803 – an unheroic fate that profoundly disturbed many Irish literati including Charles Robert Maturin, in addition to the failure of democratic expectations in England and on the Continent. The hybrid text of Maturin’s Derridean Gothic novels and dramas, conjuring spectres from the past as a cure for a diseased present, “accurately

93 Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 4. 167–172. 94 Jacqueline Labbe, The Romantic Paradox: Love, Violence and the Uses of Romance 1760– 1830, New York and Basingstoke 2000, 8. 95 Gerhart Hoffmeister, Byron und der europäische Byronismus, Erträge der Forschung, Darmstadt 1983, 84–85.

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Introduction

reflects the social, cultural, and political fragmentation of the author’s contemporary Ireland”.96 When such political disillusions followed each other in a row, supplemented by personal disillusions, ostracism, banishment, disease, crippling or loss by desertion, or death, belief in Platonism or Christianity as well as in the concept of the visionary Romantic prophet-priest-poet was increasingly shaken. In his retrospective Autobiography (1850), the 75-year-old Leigh Hunt remembers the na"ve Positive Romantic faith that his masque The Descent of Liberty (1815), written in prison after Napoleon’s abdication in 1814, had firmly proposed via his vision of the final triumph of liberty over tyranny, and finds he is ashamed of the work composed in his younger days.97 A Radical Whig, he was released from prison but kept under observation by government spies. Percy Shelley expressed the consequence of the amalgam of personal and political disillusion in the tale of Helen and Lionel in his epyllion Rosalind and Helen, written shortly before and after his experience of ostracism and exile in 1818. Its two narratives feature paternal tyranny, marital misery, political persecution, exile, disillusionment, loss of faith, and death. In view of the loss by persecution of her Radical lover Lionel, Helen paints the darkened revolutionary spirit and broken dreams of 1818 in terms of then and now : Alas! all hope is buried now. But then men dreamed the aged earth Was labouring in that mighty birth, Which many a poet and a sage Has aye foreseen – the happy age When truth and love shall dwell below Among the works and ways of men; Which on this world not power but will Even now is wanting to fulfil.98

Shelley’s Platonism, nourished by his translation of Plato’s Symposion, was shaken. The Blakean visions of light in darkness, or fire in frost and steel dissolving tyrannies and prophesying the Millennium of Paradise Regained, might be wishful thinking; the Shelleyan interpretation of green, sunny islands in the dark and stormy ocean of death prophesying Paradise Regained might be wrong; the course of history might be circular rather than dialectical. The biblical Book of Ecclesiastes and the sun’s circular course supported that doubt and confirmed a concept of Classical Tradition historiography. After all, frost, darkness, and 96 Christina Morin, Charles Robert Maturin and the Haunting of Irish Romantic Fiction, Manchester 2011, 83. 97 Leigh Hunt, Selected Writings, ed. John Strachan et al., Pickering Masters, London 2003, V. 83–85. 98 P.B. Shelley, Rosalind and Helen, 1819, lines 601–609, in: Poetical Works, 177.

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annihilation in an ocean of death might be the destiny of civilizations as well as of individuals; history and the pilgrimage or sea-cruise of life might have no millennial or metaphysical aim – we may helplessly drift rather than successfully steer our course on that ocean, and a nostalgic return to a possible state of innocence and equality might be impossible. When Percy and Mary Shelley’s daughter Clara died in the autumn of 1818, the year of their exile from England, Percy Shelley’s prospect poem “Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills” (MS October 1818) simultaneously affirmed and doubted the Positive Romantic poet’s Platonism. Following the daily course of the sun with references to the annual course of the seasons, the poem features an unbalanced Platonic speaker who, confronted with the painful experience of the world’s and history’s circularity, talks himself into a belief that the world’s and history’s circularity must one day be overcome in a regained paradise: Other flowering isles must be In the sea of Life and Agony : Other spirits float and flee O’er that gulf: even now, perhaps, On some rock the wild wave wraps, With folded wings they waiting sit For my bark, to pilot it To some calm and blooming cove […] We may live so happy there, That the Spirits of the Air, Envying us, may even entice To our healing Paradise The polluting multitude; […] And the earth grow young again.99

Drawing from the immediate experience of exile under Tsar Alexander I and strict censorship at the hand of Tsar Nicholas I, Aleksandr Pushkin diagnosed a decline of the Russian taste for affirmative literature as it had been preponderant in eighteenth-century England, and the rise of Romantic Disillusionism with its disorientation of man and morality. His backward, na"ve, and bookish Tatyana, well-read in Samuel Richardson’s novels, misunderstands Onegin as a modern Grandison, ignorant of the fact that the unequivocally virtuous Grandison is fading out and being eclipsed by darker heroes such as the vampire, the Wan99 P.B. Shelley, Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills, 1819, 335–373, in: Poetical Works, 558. Note the frequency of the doubting verbs “must” and “may” in conjunction with the adverb “perhaps”.

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Introduction

dering Jew, Maturin’s Melmoth, Byron’s Corsair, and Charles Nodier’s Sbogar.100 In the course of the verse novel Tatyana’s Positive Romantic dreams yield to nightmarish ones, and she must realize that romance is shattered by the reality of modern Russian life, commented throughout by a narrator who is himself a Romantic Disillusionist turned literary realist. When the Romantic Disillusionist Onegin kills his friend – the satirically portrayed Romantic Platonist Vladimir Lansky, an ecstatic dreamer of paradise – in a senseless duel, this also symbolizes the victory of Romanticism’s dark underside in Russia as well as in Britain, France, and Germany. At the time of the exploration of the unconscious versus the conscious, which was also around the time of England’s Seven Years War with France (1756–1763), Horace Walpole wrote the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1765), subtitling it “A Gothic Story”. The subtitle was ambiguous as it simultaneously referred to Britain’s beloved past and to the “dark Catholicism” of the country’s hated Other, France,101 just as night was the uncanny Other of day and the unconscious the uncanny Other of the conscious – in Sigmund Freud’s term, “unheimlich”. Around the time of the French Revolution and England’s fear of a French invasion, the negative, criminal, and subversive associations of the Gothic increased, and not only in England. It was the Gothic novelist and composer E.T.A. Hoffmann who applied the German term Nachtstücke – originally used for Caravaggio’s and Rembrandt’s Baroque chiaroscuro type of paintings with their simultaneity of clearly illuminated scenes set off against things hidden in darkness – to the genre. In his fiction, dark forests inhabited by robbers and hiding devilry surround noble castles and virtuous huts, mirroring the dark powers that threaten the lives of the best and most innocent of men and the hidden corruption that irresistibly draws them into a vortex of evil. His hatred of evil notwithstanding, the virtuous forester Andres helps the devil Ignaz Denner escape justice, “wie von unwiderstehlicher Macht getrieben”.102 The dark family secret that Denner is his virtuous wife Giorgina’s father and the son of a dark alchemist, who both murder children in satanic rites, eventually comes to light. The dark powers that enmesh Andres and Giorgina are also dark powers within themselves, including their fascination with stolen gold and jewels symbolically hidden in a box, a closed space symbolizing the unconscious. In Romantic music, a strain of earthbound melancholy simultaneously ran alongside and undercut the strain of joy of the type of Schiller’s and Beethoven’s “Freude schöner Götterfunken”. Hoffmann’s musical director Johannes Kreisler, 100 Pushkin, Evgeny Onegin, 1825–1833, chapter 3, stanzas 10–12, in: Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse, translated by Stanley Mitchell, Penguin Classics, 2008, 58–59. 101 Angela Wright, Britain, France and the Gothic 1764–1820, Cambridge 2013, 1–32. 102 Hoffmann, Nachtstücke, Ignaz Denner, 1816–1817, in: Sämtliche poetischen Werke, ed. Hannsludwig Geiger, Tempel-Klassiker, Berlin and Darmstadt 1963, I. 656.

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a portrait of the author himself, suffers from his inability to unite the Platonic ideal of universal transcendental music reminiscent of Paradise with music’s utility-orientated function in the daily experienced imperfect world of Paradise Lost. “Die Jesuiterkirche in G.” (in Nachtstücke 1816–1817) exposes the Romantic artist’s dilemma, typified in the myth of Prometheus, irresistibly attracted to the ideal due to his awareness of the divine spark, yet daily confronted with the realities of a stupid world: Berthold, the aspiring and gifted painter of heavenly truth and beauty, works on a high scaffold from which both he and the art-loving enthusiastic narrator (Hoffmann himself) may fall to their deaths at any time. Having come too near the ideal in a heavenly perfect painting, Berthold must die.103 Hoffmann’s theatre manager in his dialogic satirical novella Seltsame Leiden eines Theaterdirektors (1819) suffers from the quick changes of popular taste excused as zeitgeist, the philistinism of the narrow-minded audience of his German principality, as well as the boosting of bad and denigration of good artists by incompetent critics – in short, the non-Platonic reality that a true artist is confronted with daily. Hoffmann’s model was Denis Diderot’s dialogue Le neveu de Rameau (MS 1762), Diderot’s Preromantic plea for true artistic expression versus Neoclassical views of rule-orientated theatrical representation.104 Hoffmann’s failed artists were modelled on Wackenroder’s and Tieck’s musician Joseph Berglinger in Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (1797), which gave an earlier fictitious portrait illustrating this manic simultaneity of enthusiasm and depression in Romantic music.105 The work features a piously devoted, contented, and successful old Platonic artist, Raphael, at the beginning, and concludes with a despairing and failing modern artist, Berglinger, whose ardent prayers go unheard and whose life gives the lie to both Platonism and Christianity.106 The pious narrator in his monastery, who begins his tales in an affirmative tone of piety, ends on a note of doubt, sneaking out with a heap of unanswered questions and pauses for critical thought. Tonkünstler Berglinger mirrors his rebellious Romantic authors’ split between idealism and realism, the antithetically composite nature of an ever aspiring mind and an ever weighty body. In the work’s continuation, Phantasien über die Kunst (1814), completed and edited by Tieck long after Wackenroder’s death, Berglinger’s idealistic essays come at the end of the work, followed by an alle103 Birgit Röder, A Study of the Major Novellas of E.T.A. Hoffmann, Rochester NY 2003, 79–93. 104 Hoffmann read Diderot’s dialogue in the translation by Goethe (1804), who, however, understood the erratic character of Rameau’s nephew as Diderot’s plea for his own Neoclassical concept of the theatre. 105 Daniel Lettgen, “… und hat zu retten keine Kraft”: die Melancholie der Musik, Mainz 2010, 189–210. 106 Wackenroder / Tieck, Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders, 1797, ed. Martin Bollacher, Reclams Universal Bibliothek, Stuttgart: Reclam 1955, 2009, 96–116.

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gorical poem entitled “Der Traum”, which corresponds to “Phantasien”. It features a pre-Byronic paradisiacal dream of a beautiful flower that saves the speaker and his friend from bleak reality only to fling him back there, alone, yearning, and doubtful. An artist’s mortal life will, after all, never be an eternal work of art, nor will his work ever reach perfection; to borrow from Baudelaire, “le spleen” will ever spoil “l’id8al”. Grillparzer’s novella “Der arme Spielmann” (1847) is indebted to this sceptical view of Platonism, featuring a disillusioned violinist with high aspirations and limited capacities of materialization. Avictim of ancien r8gime paternal tyranny and broken in his youth, the flawed sound of his instrument never approaches the perfect sound that he carries in his mind. The novella was written under the impression of the failure of Grillparzer’s critical comedy Weh dem, der lügt (1838) in imperial Vienna, after a theatre scandal brought on by the author’s implicit ridicule of the outdated ancien r8gime. Decades before Grillparzer’s novella, we have seen, a musical artist’s failure had been the experience of Hoffmann’s Kapellmeister Kreisler with his “Leiden des Künstlers an der Welt”, first featured in Kreisleriana (1812–1820), Fantasiestücke in Callot’s Manier (1814), and later in Lebensansichten des Katers Murr nebst fragmentarischer Biographie des Kapellmeisters Johannes Kreisler in zufälligen Makulaturblättern (1819–1821). Unlike the tomcat Kater Murr, whose philistinism and narrative unreliability appear not least in his smug ordering of the contingencies of his animal life into a Goethean order, Kreisler, like his literary model Berglinger, is a real musical genius whose devastating confrontation with life’s reality in his petty German principality makes him despair of imposing an aim and purpose on his fragmented life. His telling name characterizes him as forever moving in an absurd circle – every attempt at consonance ends in a dissonance, just as all of Hoffmann’s Gothic novels and tales end in a dissonance that defies sense.107 Whenever music has elated him, his spirits sink again with his awareness of the insensibility of his philistine audience: Sie sind alle fortgegangen. – Ich hätte es an dem Zischeln, Scharren, Räuspern, Brummen durch alle Tonarten bemerken können; […] Spielen kann ich nicht mehr, denn ich bin ganz ermattet; daran ist mein alter herrlicher Freund hier auf dem Notenpulte schuld, der mich schon wieder einmal, wie Mephistopheles den Faust, auf seinem Mantel, durch die Lüfte getragen hat, und so hoch, daß ich die Menschlein unter mir nicht sah und merkte, unerachtet sie tollen Lärm genug gemacht haben mögen.108

107 Lettgen, 222–234. The two Romantic titles suggest fragmented imagination as conditioning a fragmented and haphazard life. 108 Hoffmann, Phantasiestücke in Callots Manier, Johannes Kreislers des Kapellmeisters musikalische Leiden, 1814, in: Sämtliche poetischen Werke, ed. cit. I. 29–30.

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Moreover, good music like all good art is not the result of technical mastery as in Neoclassicism, but of a spiritual elation that combines joy and pain, sadness and bliss (“Freude und Schmerz, Wehmut und Wonne”), and so has a Gothic underside that subverts the ideal and aims at carrying the audience into the uncanny and remote realm of spirits and ghosts (“in das ferne Geisterreich der Töne”).109 Thus, due to heterogeneous human nature in a heterogeneous world, suffering is the true artist’s inescapable fate. Hoffmann’s fairy tale “Klein Zaches genannt Zinnober” (1819) not only satirizes the Enlightenment’s narrow-minded epistemology and aesthetics but also Positive Romanticism’s belief in the ideal. Only the poet’s fancy can temporarily turn the hideous, stupid, and uncouth dwarf Klein Zaches into the beautiful, intelligent, and adored youth Zinnober. Similarly, in “Der Sandmann” (in Nachtstücke 1816–1817) the optical illusion of Nathanael can for a short time turn the dead puppet Olimpia (a symbol of the rigidity of both the Classical Tradition of the Enlightenment and the ancien r8gime) into an attractive and lovable young woman, and, in “Nussknacker und Mausekönig” (in Die Serapionsbrüder 1819–1821), the childish fantasy of little Fritz can for a while turn Drosselmeier’s mechanical castle into life. The illusion must necessarily come to an end, proving to be mere “Zinnober”, or rubbish, and the fetid reality of this world must be revealed, only to be covered up by a new poetic fantasy. Instead of an upward movement, history turns in an absurd circle – a circulus vitiosus – with false expectations or misdirected interpretations of progress. The ideal can neither be approached (let alone realized) nor is there any learning process (let alone character improvement) in this parodied bildungsroman. All meliorism is mere external deception brought about by the creative imagination. Imagination, originally the mind’s passive reception of external images, had in the course of the eighteenth century changed its meaning to the mind’s active production of images not necessarily existent in empirical reality and thus come under the suspicion of producing illusions (as in London’s Eidophuysicon of 1781 and Phantasmagoria of 1802).110 Nathanael’s increasing madness is due to such an overheated creative imagination controlled less and less by reason, as is the increasing madness in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), where the maddest of the three protagonists, Mad-eline Usher, draws on her twin brother Roderick, who in turn draws on his former schoolmate, the narrator. To varying degrees they all suffer from an excessive artistic sensitivity that makes them confuse dreams and reality. Romantic Disillusionism’s distrust of the Positive Romantic doctrine of the redemptive and reintegrative power of the imagination is ex109 Hoffmann, Kreisleriana, Beethovens Instrumental-Musik, 1812–1820, ed. cit. I. 50–51. 110 See Heinz Schott, Magie der Natur, Aachen 2014, II. 51.

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pressed to greater effect nowhere else. Here, a freely ranging imagination detached from reason appears as disintegrative in the sense that it destroys man by unsettling his mental sanity. The reflection (or artistic representation) of the house in the tarn is the more maddening the more people concentrate on it instead of the real thing. Madeline and Roderick, each other’s alter ego, die in stark mental insanity whereas the narrator, who fights against madness by seeking natural explanations for the uncanny occurrences in and around the house, escapes its collapse as the moon (luna – lunatic – madness) shines through its crevices (cracks – cracked). One political and aesthetic response to this split between dream and reality was the aforementioned Biedermeier. Originally a contemptuous term that German literary historiography applies to that period of baffled hopes, and which would better be labelled “Realidealismus”,111 it is misleading as it denotes only one widespread and unambiguous reaction: tame resigning withdrawal into one’s own private, domestic sphere. With female poets in particular, Biedermeier could be a mere mask of snug conformity throughout the Romantic Period, concealing their doubt and discontent. In the 1790s, Joanna Baillie had already designed a type of drama that was covertly sceptical of traditional anthropology where her follower Byron was openly provocative, both responding to the disappearance of a theological word that underpinned civic humanism into an existential world overseen by the state.112 The same applies to the work of the Scottish poet Ann Bannerman, who adopted and developed Baillie’s theory of the passions and covertly argued for the superiority of the penetrating female view of things, albeit crossing conventional roles of sex and gender without Byron’s overt daring.113 In a secularized time of espionage, persecution, and treason trials, as well as of repeated disillusionment with change for the better, violence and fear as parts of the unalterable and mad human condition became favourite topics. A number of female poets of the 1790s, such as Elizabeth Moody and Amelia Opie, had already masked their political messages in sentimental anti-war poetry, reminding readers that wars destroyed happiness, suggesting that fathers and brothers lost their lives in the interest of the privileged classes and ruling government. They knew they could expect little women’s liberation from a male-dominated millennium, at least not in the sense of a return to King Alfred’s Golden Age.114 Their nuanced, dual discourses could, however, subvert

111 Term coined by Heinz Kindermann. See Herbert Frenzel – Elisabeth Frenzel, Daten deutscher Dichtung, Cologne and Berlin 1953, 1971, 349–356. 112 Isobel Armstrong, Joanna Baillie, Byron and Satanic Drama, Nottingham 2003, 52–53. 113 Andrew Elfenbein, Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role, New York NY 1999, 125–147. 114 Stephen C. Behrendt, British Women Poets and the Reverberations of Radicalism in the

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their “sentimental coziness, smiling moderation, and home-and-hearth atmosphere”.115 Notable examples are Felicia Dorothea Hemans (1793–1835), with her popular volumes of poetry : The Domestic Affections (1812), Records of Woman (1828), and Songs of the Affections (1830), as well as Letitia Elizabeth Landon, alias “L.E.L.” (1802–1838), with The Vow of the Peacock and Other Poems (1835), and her earlier verse tale The Improvisatrice (1824) that equated love and death in the manner of the recently deceased Byron.116 Equally, Charlotte Dacre, with her daring Gothic novel Zofloya, or, The Moor (1806), features a narrator whose insistent conservative moralizing fails to conceal the immorality and scepticism of the shockingly unfeminine invention. Mrs Grundy’s Biedermeier, or bourgeois smugness, thus unmasks itself as convenient but mendacious political correctness. As in Hemans’s long poem “The Sceptic” (MS 1819), with its censure of and intertextual links to Byron, doubt about a world beyond as well as criticism of contemporary practices of government and sexual politics are, consciously or unconsciously, concealed in a double-voiced 8criture f8minine.117 Admiration of Wordsworth and opposition to Byron are subtly discredited so that the reader senses the speaker’s secret envy of Wordsworth’s professed belief as well as the secret sharing in Byron’s doubt. The work’s hymnic praise of England’s peace and beauty, which forms the conclusion of “The Sceptic”, is a typical example of the ambiguity of female Biedermeier, with its seeming retreat into domestic privacy and apparent praise of domestic virtues. The exaggerated eulogium implies a critique of the calm of a churchyard, enforced by the government’s legal policy and the vigilance of the secret police. The lines are pervaded with an atmosphere of oppression and scenes of darkness almost unrelieved; churchyard trees, passing bells, and religious instruction dominated by nostalgia for more inspired times long past, all ending on a note of death. The “people that walketh in darkness” do not see a great light but deepening shades, with a faint glimmer of faraway cold stars symbolizing the awareness that fading hope dies last: Still, where thy hamlet-vales, O chosen isle! In the soft beauty of their verdure smile, Where yew and elm o’ershade the lowly fanes, That guard the peasant’s records and remains, 1790s, in: Stephen C. Behrendt (ed.), Romanticism, Radicalism, and the Press, Detroit MI 1997, 83–102. 115 V. Nemoianu, The Taming of Romanticism, 74. 116 Adam Roberts, Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L.E.L.), The Improvisatrice, in: Duncan Wu (ed.), A Companion to Romanticism, 294–300. 117 D. Riess, Letitia Landon and the Dawn of English Post-Romanticism, in: Studies in English Literature, 36 (1996), 807–27; and Nanora Sweet – Barbara Taylor (ed.), The Sceptic: A Hemans-Byron Dialogue, Romantic Circles, facsimile of the edition of 1820. Last accessed 15 June 2016.

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May the blest echos of the Sabbath-bell, Sweet on the quiet of the woodlands swell, And from each cottage-dwelling of thy glades, When starlight glimmers through the deepening shades, Devotion’s voice in choral hymns arise, And bear the Land’s warm incense to the skies. There may the mother, as with anxious joy, To Heaven her lessons consecrate her boy, Teach his young accents still th’immortal lays, Of Zion’s bards, in inspiration’s days, When Angels […]118

If Hemans’s idyllic nature is Wordsworthian it is a deeply troubled version of it, and if Landon’s pious medievalism is Disraelian it is a profoundly doubtful variant. “The Vow of the Peacock” (1835), written as a literary companion piece to Daniel Maclise’s early painting The Chivalric Vow of the Ladies of the Peacock (1835), tells the story of a knight who observes his noble vow to help a lady in distress which results, however, in her death. In her introductory stanzas, Landon laments the dreary reality of her time that can find consolation in an (idealized) past and a (doubtful) future, only to unmask that past, with its firm Christian belief in a better world to come, as being no better than the present: The present – the actual – were they our all – Too heavy our burden, too hopeless our thrall; But heaven, that spreadeth o’er all its blue cope, Hath given us memory, – hath given us hope! And redeemeth the lot which the present hath cast, By the fame of the future, the dream of the past.119

The case of John Clare, the insane Peasant Poet of Northumberland, provides a parallel. Clare’s publisher John Taylor, the publisher of Keats and the London Magazine, pressed the poet to write Wordsworthian nature verse, an urge that Clare resisted. Clare admired Wordsworth and found spiritual consolation in reading his poetry, but the Wordsworthian mode of his verse before his hospitalization in the private High Beach mental asylum in Epping Forest in 1837 is infected with Byronism, even before his “mad” shift to the Byronic mode with his rewritten stanzas of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan (MSS High Beach ca 1840–1841).120 From Clare’s Descriptions of Rural Life and Scenery (1820) and The Village Minstrel (1821) through to The Shepherd’s Calendar and 118 Hemans, The Sceptic, lines 529–50, ed. cit. 119 Landon, The Vow of the Peacock and Other Poems, The Vow of the Peacock, lines 21–26 , London 1835, ed. F.J. Sypher, reprint New York 1997, 2. 120 F. Burwick, Poetic Madness and the Romantic Imagination, University Park PA 1996, 254– 275.

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The Rural Muse (1835), speakers are strangely rapt with – but not metaphysically consoled and stabilized by – nature’s beauty. The later sense of isolation and estrangement is contained in Clare’s earlier poetry, as ecstatic visions and dreams of rural beauty could be troubled by haunting nightmarishness, with a De Quinceyan note: […] mine a feeling of joy hope & fear Mingld together yet I knew not why Were all was beauty trouble shoud be bye The place was light & yet no sun was there To cause it – pale & beautifully fair Nor glare nor gloom […]121

The speakers of Clare’s later poetry, written in the confinement of his two mental asylums, convey a sense of total isolation, claustrophobia, and lack of “sense of life or joys”.122 Unlike the Positive Romantic recluses who, like Christ in the desert and unlike the young poet in P.B. Shelley’s Alastor (1816), go into solitude of their own free will with the intention of gaining strength for their social mission, these speakers have lost all contact with their childhood, nature, and God. Their Wordsworthian efforts at regaining the lost union are vain: I long for scenes, where man hath never trod A place where woman never smiled or wept There to abide with my Creator, God; And sleep as I in childhood, sweetly slept, Untroubling, and untroubled where I lie, The grass below – above the vaulted sky.123

In the Victorian city poetry of the post-Byronic Spasmodic School, the modern resident in industrialized cities is totally estranged from nature. Alexander Smith’s poem “Glasgow” (1857) is a typical example. Trees bending in the wind have been replaced by telegraph masts, the ebb and flow of the sea by waves of workmen pouring into the caves of unnatural factories, and cold streams of water by hot streams of molten pig iron. Railway tracks for fast trains have come to cross slowly flowing natural rivers and rills as they bring noise and light into the natural nightly repose of cities and villages. Remnants of nature that intrude into the cities, a ray of light or a solitary flower, revive the speaker’s memories of early childhood in the country, but, in distinction to Wordsworth, cannot make 121 Clare, The Night Mare, MS 1822, lines 8–13, in: Poems of the Middle Period, ed. Eric Robinson et al., Oxford 1996, I. 332. 122 Clare, I Am, line 9, 1848, in: Later Poems 1837–1864, ed. Eric Robinson – David Powell, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1984, I. 396. Written in the Northampton mental asylum post 1842, no MS known. 123 Ibid. lines 13–18, ed. cit. I. 397.

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him relive the solaces of nature and the glories of childhood. Even when he seeks respiritualization in the church – be it leaning against the churchyard rails or climbing into the belfry – he cannot overcome his estrangement from nature and religion: It moves me not – I know her tomb Is yonder in the shapeless gloom.124

The estrangement, scepticism, occasional despair, pessimistic deism, and even dogmatic nihilism of male Romantic poets constituted a radical, more demonstratively aggressive and openly disobedient kind of doubt, withdrawal, or resignation. The modern feeling of horror vacui, resulting from disbelief in the existence of a protecting benevolent Creator-God, had notably been given expression in Jean Paul’s “Rede des toten Christus” (1796), a nightmarish vision in his novel Siebenkäs (1796–1797), from which the author distanced himself while nevertheless feeling threatened by it. Madame de Sta[I’s review of the work in De l’Allemagne (1813) made it widely known in England and France. This modern Heideggerian experience of man’s Geworfenheit, being “thrown” into the world like a pig, found earlier radical expression in the works of Ptienne Pivert de Senancour (born 1770), Ernst August Friedrich Klingemann (born 1777), Charles Nodier (born 1780), and Karoline von Günderrode (born 1780). It appeared in the fiction of Jean Paul (born 1763), Ludwig Tieck (born 1773) and Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (born 1776), in the wake of the subversive English Gothic novel, with its focus on hidden vice and madness, man’s split heterogeneous nature, the morally neutral and chaotic unconscious below the conscious, and man’s dark subterranean caverns and abysses. It characterized the Plays on the Passions of Joanna Baillie (born 1762), especially her “Satanic” tragedies, which Byron recognized as preceding the heresy of his own “Satanic” drama Manfred (MS 1816–1817, 1817), and which showed man separated from all social connections and dominated by his passions.125 It also shaped the plays of Heinrich von Kleist (born 1777) via the concept of Tragik, which represented illogically constituted postlapsarian man and woman as the helpless victims of irreconcilable polar differences, such as personal impulses and social or moral restrictions, in a world characterized by an illogical Weltriss or Riss im Sinngefüge der Welt. Only in an imaginative world of fancy and fairy tale could man and woman balance these murderous juxtapositions and survive happily. Romantic Disillusionism was heterogeneous in line with its concept of a heterogeneous world, symbolized by a quaint house with many irregular rooms, Dr 124 Smith, City Poems, Glasgow, lines 111–112, in: Valentine Cunningham (ed.), The Victorians: An Anthology of Poetry and Poetics, Oxford: Blackwell 2000, 676. 125 Isobel Armstrog, Joanna Baillie, Byron and Satanic Drama, Nottingham 2003, 5–6.

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Bransby’s rambling boarding school in Edgar Allan Poe’s Gothic tale “William Wilson” (1838). At its core lay doubt surrounding the progress of mankind towards a terrestrial millennium, and about a life in a paradise beyond death in the unbroken literary tradition of the agnosticism of the Sophist Protagoras, as portrayed in the dialogues of his essentialist adversary Plato.126 Negative Romanticism then swelled into full force in the works of Ugo Foscolo (born 1778), Charles Robert Maturin (born 1782), Henri Beyle alias Stendhal (born 1783), Lord Byron (born 1788), Franz Grillparzer (born 1791), John Clare (born 1793), Wilhelm Müller (born 1794), John Polidori (born 1795), August Graf von Platen (born 1796), Heinrich Heine (born 1797), Giacomo Leopardi (born 1798), Aleksandr Pushkin (born 1799), Christian Dietrich Grabbe (born 1801), Nikolaus Lenau (born 1802), Thomas Lovell Beddoes (born 1803), Wilhelm Friedrich Waiblinger (born 1804), G8rard de Nerval and Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly and Jos8 de Espronceda (born 1808), Edgar Allan Poe and P8trus Borel and Juliusz Słowacki (born 1809), Alfred de Musset and Karel Hynek M#cha (born 1810), Karl Gutzkow (born 1811), Georg Büchner (born 1813), Mikhail Lermontov (born 1814), Branwell Bront[ (born 1817), Emily Bront[ (born 1818), Herman Melville (born 1819), and others. In their wake came Charles Baudelaire (born 1821) and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (born 1828) and others, including the early Victorian Romantics of the short-lived “Spasmodic School”, so called after Thomas Carlyle’s indictment of Byron’s writings: Philip James Bailey (born 1816) and Sydney Dobell (born 1824) and Alexander Smith (born 1830). They shared the Positive Romantics’ yearning for a better world and a paradise beyond, but suspected it of merely being a dream and, by extension, a form of selftorture. They were Romantics in the sense that they openly confessed their true – though in their own opinion unjust and unjustifiable – suffering, both personal and political: physical deformities and diseases (Byron, Leopardi, Dobell); divergent sexual orientation (Byron, Platen); depression and addiction (Leopardi, Poe, Barbey d’Aurevilly); mental illness and hospitalization (Clare, Nerval); moral disorientation and psychic duality (Tieck); love affairs frustrated by fate and social conventions (Byron, Leopardi, Poe, Musset); political and social exile (Byron, Stendhal, Foscolo, Heine, Espronceda, Słowacki, Lermontov); self-exile (Lenau); social and literary isolation (Clare, M#cha, Melville); political and social persecution and ostracism (Byron, Foscolo, Büchner, Grabbe, Poe, Nerval); poverty and tuberculosis (Emily Bront[, Waiblinger); denial of recognition and support in spite of high talents (Branwell Bront[); working-class poverty (Alexander Smith); and destruction of career for protest, lack of political correctness, or heterodoxy (Maturin, M#cha). And they were also Ro126 Jürgen Klein, Schwarze Romantik: Studien zur englischen Literatur im europäischen Kontext, Frankfurt am Main 2005, 155–173.

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mantics in the sense of exhibiting extreme individualism and self-consciousness. Most of them openly showed their passions and publicly celebrated their consequently scandalous lives without apparent restraint as a mode and demonstration of protest against their conservative age, thus setting the example for the later Decadent cult of 8pater le bourgeois (Byron, Büchner, Grabbe). Their theatrical poses notwithstanding, their suffering was genuine, unlike that of their many outward imitators, of whom Lermontov’s Grushnitskij is a literary portrait. Byron was their great model. Lermontov expressed this in his poem outwardly negating while in reality affirming his self-identification with Byron (MS 1832): a “double Byron” in doubly repressive Russia, doomed to perish younger and even more unfortunate, an “unknown elect” with all his hopes shattered by the slavish and ignorant world’s persecution.127 Thus the Romantic Disillusionists exposed themselves to reproaches of mere show and masquerade, a possibility suggested in Lady Caroline Lamb’s vicious novel Glenarvon (1816), written in revenge at Lord Byron for breaking off their adulterous love affair. This reproach, and the reproach to have rejected all religion in a proud denial – negation for negation’s sake – was (and still is) raised in judgement of those romantiques d8froqu8s or entromantisierte Romantiker and entlaufene Romantiker, or romantiques 8chapp8s (as Heine classified himself) by their conservative, bourgeois critics.128 Byron, however, repeatedly admitted his sceptical belief in God, albeit as a pessimistic deist, and so did Heinrich Heine before his death, although he refused to commit himself to the dogmas of an established religion, and ordered that no rabbi or priest should perform his burial rites. Downright negation, by contrast, was the political nihilism portrayed in the sceptic author Karl Gutzkow’s short novel Die Nihilisten (1854): refusal of obedience, of deference, and of recognition to any worldly or spiritual authority.129 This was supported by a metaphysical nihilism or systematic atheism, an inverted firm belief as endorsed by the chaotic narrator of Klingemann’s anonymously published novel Nachtwachen (1804), as his doubt of all facts, values, and creeds verges on dogma. Positive religious creed was thus ultimately replaced by an equally dogmatic anti-creed: negation of an aim in life except nothingness, negation of a natural logic and order in a chaotic world that resembled a madhouse, negation of a moral universe, negation of man’s divine nature separate from the animals, negation of man’s inward consistency, negation of the benevolence of God and immortality of the soul, negation of nature’s sympathy with man, and negation of a final regeneration and resurrection as 127 Lermontov, þVc, p ^V 3QZa_^ (posth. 1845), in: Gedichte, annot. Kay Borowsky, Reclams Universal Bibliothek, Stuttgart: Reclam 2000, 58. 128 For the term see K. Weinberg, Henri Heine, “romantique d8froqu8”, h8raut du symbolisme franÅais, New Haven and Paris 1954. 129 D. Arendt, Der “poetische Nihilismus” in der Romantik, Tübingen 1972, II. 542.

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dialectical synthesis: “Und der Widerhall im Gebeinhaus ruft zum letzten Male – nichts!”130 Klingemann’s Nachtwachen is a subversive pastiche of Friedrich Schlegel’s Positive Romantic concept of progressive, universal poetry (“progressive Universalpoesie”) as formulated in his Athenäum-Fragment 116 (1798), an ongoing, never accomplished reintegration of all the separate genres of poetry and prose into their original, prelapsarian unity. Among its characters, Klingemann’s novel introduces a poor anonymous city poet who hangs himself because hunger does not allow him to find the required balance (“Schweben”) between the real and the ideal – the conditio sine qua non of the progress of universal poetry. Furthermore, it is a radical perversion of Novalis’s Positive Romantic novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1801), replacing an inspired poet’s ascension to the stars with the disillusioned city poet’s ascension to a suicide’s rope, the blue flower of German Romanticism with a vulgar onion, while also inverting Novalis’s narrative order.131 In Kreuzgang, Klingemann’s narrator with the telling name associating both church and torture, explored the subversive potential that a failure of high Romantic expectations of Paradise Regained would produce. Disappointed on all levels, Kreuzgang, the shoemaker and poet (in the wake of Hans Sachs and Jakob Böhme), becomes a sarcastic night watchman, a destructive satirist who derides all aspects of life with an absurd laughter that neither distinguishes comedy from tragedy nor provides relief. Here even the heritage of Preromanticism is perverted with the distortion of the trope of the wise, primitive fool. Harley, the protagonist of Henry Mackenzie’s naively sentimental and naively benevolent Man of Feeling (1771), and Harry Clinton, the protagonist of Henry Brooke’s equally naive Fool of Quality (1765– 1770), are turned into the bitter and destructive Aristophanes; Laurence Sterne’s playfully imaginative novels Tristram Shandy (1759–1767) and Sentimental Journey (1768) are radicalized into a novel of irredeemable existential chaos; and Edward Young’s pious Night Thoughts (1742–1745) are replaced by the Nachtwachen’s sacrilegious scorn of life, anti-clericalism, and incipient nihilism. In his eighth night watch, Kreuzgang doubts the validity of all epistemological cognition and the fixity of all values and norms, including ethics. On the one hand he derides the mere Enlightenment empiricists who believe in the cognition of the world by material facts, and on the other he derides the PlatonicRomantic poet, perched alone and high above the crowd, as a wishful dreamer given the lie by the hard facts of life; and he derides the Platonic German Idealist

130 [Klingemann], Nachtwachen. Von Bonaventura, 1804, 1805, Manesse Bibliothek, Zurich 2001, 173. Apart from the Gothic, this is one of the earliest literary manifestations of Romantic Disillusionism proper. 131 Gerhard Kaiser, Literarische Romantik, Göttingen 2010, 65–73.

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philosopher Fichte for his mad belief in a world of immaterial entities behind a projected world of mere appearances: Den mechanischen Vorlesungen über die Natur wünschte ich auch beizuwohnen, in denen es gelehrt wird, wie man eine Welt mit geringem Aufwand von Kräften vollständig zusammenstellen kann, und die jungen Schüler zu Weltschöpfern ausgebildet werden, da man sie jetzt nur zu Ichschöpfern anzieht.132

Kreuzgang thus precedes the subversive fools of Beddoes’s bitter neo-Jacobean tragedy Death’s Jest-Book (MS 1829, publ. posth. 1850), Isbrand and Mandrake. A world that is now incurably chaotic and no longer susceptible to the fool’s art of healing raises the suspicion that it has always been a mere tragicomic “Fastnachtsspiel” or “Possenspiel”,133 without order or aims. And the night, a favourite time of Positive Romantic adoration and sublimity, becomes a period of nightmarish negative epiphany. The Platonic Romantics represented night as the time of the interaction between the divine and the terrestrial, when dreams revealed truths and inspired works of art beyond the limits of reason, when the starry sky gave man a soul-expanding feeling of stability, security, and integration into an unchangeable whole; in Kant’s words the starry sky above and the moral law within us. Thomas Lovell Beddoes’s sonnet “To Night”, on the contrary, imagines it as a frightening Gothic monster dividing man and the genial sun, hatching destructive storms and diseases, thereby giving the lie to the biblical account of the creation of an orderly universe of light protected by an empyreum, as well to the alleged domestication of darkness by the secular Enlightenment. All light and order always fall back into pristine chaos: So thou art come again, old black-winged Night, Like an huge bird, between us and the sun, Hiding, with out-stretched form, the genial light; […] To pounce upon the world with eager claw, And tomb time, death, and substance in thy maw.134

And Beddoes’s two sonnets entitled “A Clock Striking Midnight” have no Shelleyan Spirit of the Hour announcing the beginning of the Millennium, and deny the survival of the fleeting moment in original eternity. They consign it to what the French Decadents were to call “le grand n8ant”, original chaos that (like the human unconscious) knows no distinction between good and evil: 132 Klingemann, Nachtwachen, 82. Note the satire on Fichte philosophy of the “posited” ego producing the perceived material world as non-ego. 133 Ibid. 45. 134 Beddoes, To Night, lines 1–3, 13–14, in: Selected Poetry, ed. Judith Higgens – Michael Bradshaw, Manchester 1999, 5–6.

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Hark to the echo of Time’s footsteps; gone Those moments are into the unseen grave Of ages. They have vanished nameless. None While they are deep under the eddying wave Of the chaotic past, shall place a stone Sacred to these, the nurses of the brave, The mighty, and the good.135

In his scathing review of what he denounced as “The Fleshly School of Poetry” in the wake of the dysphemistic Romantic Period construction of inimical schools of poetry, Robert Williams Buchanan saw Beddoes as an unworthy successor to Coleridge who infected the confessedly “creedless” Dante Gabriel Rossetti with the disease of atheism, a “most unwholesome poet” producing spasmodic “affected rubbish”.136 Doubt frozen into a dogma of negation and a religion of atheism were the paradoxical though frequent consequences of Romantic Pyrrhonism, the dividing line being pervious, so that philosophy has not succeeded in coming to clear-cut definitions.137 The titular heroine of Karl Gutzkow’s sceptic novel Wally, die Zweiflerin (1835) laments these undesired effects in her diary : Das Resultat des Atheismus war auch nie ein andres, als daß er in ein System überging und zuletzt selbst eine Religion wurde.138

Nothingness had already been the real life experience of Tieck’s Balder, whose development runs parallel to the increasingly disillusioned protagonist of his three-volume novel William Lovell (1795–1796). Langeweile, preceding Baudelaire’s stronger ennui (hatred and disgust derived from the Latin “in odio”), is a major theme in Tieck’s novel; the rootless despair from a lack of an aim in life which produces a horror vacui that man fills with vain, senseless activities such as seeking glory by conquest or writing. Tieck’s formulations of Balder’s doubts may be read as anticipations of Byron, Polidori, Büchner, Leopardi, and Baudelaire, also with regard to his doubts about Platonism and the prophetic nature of the child.

135 Beddoes, A Clock Striking Midnight, 1, lines 1–7, ed. cit. 6. 136 Buchanan in: Contemporary Review, 18 (1871), 349. 137 For the problems of a definition of nihilism, with special regard to the Romantic Disillusionism of Heine and Büchner, see Federico Vercellone, Introduzione a il nichilismo, Rome 1992, 1994, passim. 138 Gutzkow, Wally, die Zweiflerin, 1835, ed. Günter Heintz, Reclams Universal Bibliothek, Stuttgart: Reclam 1979, 2005, 93.

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Es ist alles nur um die Zeit auszufüllen und etwas zu tun, die elende Sucht, das Leben mit sogenannten Geschäften auszufüllen […]; denn sonst würde schon der Knabe die Augen zumachen, sich vom langweiligen Schauspiel entfernen und sterben.139

In France, Nodier’s epistolary novel Le peintre de Saltzbourg (1803) and Senancour’s epistolary novel Oberman (1804) appeared almost simultaneously as Klingemann’s works in Germany. Le peintre de Saltzbourg, a psychological novel probing deep into the human soul, features a Wertherian hero and artist who experiences the failure of his high Romantic ideals, reminiscent of Wackenroder’s and Tieck’s Joseph Berglinger : “Tout conspire / m’accabler”.140 Oberman is a Romantic fragmentary work in statu nascendi in which the titular hero gives expression to his Romantic mal du siHcle caused by disillusionment, anticipating both Byron and Musset. Oberman’s letters, a Romantic journal intime, reveal a deeply introspective and sentimental young man who retreats into nature’s solitude – from Paris to Switzerland – but cannot find the promised rest and regeneration, thus anticipating Byron’s Manfred. To him, both the Enlightenment’s promise of happiness in progress and Romanticism’s promise of happiness in regression prove false. Repeated delusional moments of happiness nourish his increasing awareness of emptiness, meaninglessness, grand abandon, and Geworfenheit. Instead of the repeated promises of reintegration of all life into the harmony of a Wordsworthian universe, the discrepancy between what Baudelaire was later to call “l’id8al” and “le spleen” leaves Oberman, the Romantic man of feeling, with nothing but “le spleen” or “l’ennui”; boredom combined with as strong a disgust at his regression into the simplicity of nature as at his progression in cultivated cities. Oberman’s repeated failure to find calm in and integration with Alpine nature anticipates Byron’s Alpine journal of 1816, in which he ecphratically documents a state of depression that nature could not heal despite his efforts, a depression that was deeper and longer than the one described in Coleridge’s Dejection Ode (1802, 1816). As distinct from the dogmatic nihilism of Klingemann’s Kreuzgang, however, Senancour’s Oberman and Byron never quite give up hope, never arrive at the juncture where they ultimately turn an old creed of faith into a new one of negation. Oberman ends up by desiring to leave life in peace, in old age, with a faithful friend by his side and the great illusion of a faithful religion to support him: […] afin qu’en laissant la vie qui passe je retrouve quelque chose de l’illusion infinie.141 139 Tieck, William Lovell, 1795–1796, ed. Walter Münz, Reclams Universal Bibliothek, Stuttgart: Reclam 1986, 207. 140 Nodier, Le peintre de Saltzbourg, in: Anne Maurel (ed.), Le pays int8rieur : voyage au centre du moi, Paris 2008, 860. 141 Senancour, Oberman, fragment of an undated letter, tenth year, ed. Fabienne Bercegol, Pditions Flammarion, Paris 2003, 422.

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Decades later, in her preface to an 1840 edition of Oberman, George Sand, rather conservative in her outlook on life, read the novel as a pioneering work of psychology, unveiling the protagonist’s weakness of mind, interior chaos, and impotence of will; his “sensibilit8 maladive monstrueusement isol8e en l’absence d’une volont8 avide d’action”.142 According to FranÅois-Ren8 de Chateaubriand in Le G8nie du christianisme ou beaut8s de la religion chr8tienne (1802), this mal du siHcle arose from the discrepancy between a human desire for perfection and the infinite on one hand and repeated experiences of human failures and weaknesses on the other. Mikhail Lermontov, the most Byronic of all Russian poets, gave a similar diagnosis of his age’s disease via the self-exploration of his Byronic hero and enfant du siHcle Pechorin in his novel A Hero of a Our Time (1840). Pechorin compares himself to a man in a state of progressive starvation: I’m like a starving man who falls asleep exhausted and sees rich food and sparkling wine before him. He rapturously falls on these phantom gifts of the imagination and feels better, but the moment he wakes up his dream disappears and he’s left more hungry and desperate than before.143

This analysis proved generally acute and far-sighted, in connection with Chateaubriand’s seminal interpretation of Christianity as an aesthetic and moral cult (rather than doctrine) pacifying man’s appetites and longings. The Romantic self felt displaced, a frustrated stranger exiled from a paradise which it longed to regain in romantische Sehnsucht. 1) It could persist in its hope for a millennial terrestrial Paradise Regained despite lingering doubts, like William Blake or Karl Marx. 2) If this failed, it could maintain hope on a lower scale, experimenting with small utopian and egalitarian communities such as Coleridge’s and Southey’s projected pantisocracy, or Charles Fourier’s and George Ripley’s utopian socialist communities in America. 3) In despair of hope of a terrestrial paradise, it could then transpose its egalitarian expectations into art, like Wordsworth and Coleridge in Lyrical Ballads (1798), Novalis in Fragmente [Romantisierung der Welt] (1799–1800), and Chateaubriand in Le G8nie du Christianisme (1802). 4) Next, it could transpose its expectations into an eternal Paradise Regained in the world beyond, in spite of lingering doubts, like numerous poets of the generation of the 1770s: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Eichendorff, the Schlegels, and Amelia Opie. 5) Next, it could doubt the reality or possibility of a lost and regainable paradise, 142 Sand, Pr8face / Oberman, 1840, in: Maurel, Le pays int8rieur, 352–353. 143 Lermontov, 4Va_Z ^QiVT_ SaV]V^Y, 1840, transl. Paul Foote, Penguin Classics, London 1966, 2001, 131.

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both here and in the hereafter, and reluctantly suspect an endlessly repeated circle of expectation and disillusion to be the unalterable condition of man, in spite of lingering hopes to the contrary. 6) Ultimately, and more radically, it could construct a nihilistic doctrine of doubt, preaching a doctrinal creed of negation – the usual, though contradictory, end of all scepticism since classical antiquity. Byron and the Romantic Pyrrhonists stopped short of that ultimate nihilism, doubting progress without, however, endorsing total negation. Envisaging all possibilities of “truth” without committing themselves, remaining “Impartial between Tyrian and Trojan”, was their proclaimed aim.144 The yearning for paradise – real or imagined – remained with them. With experience as their chief philosopher both in their private lives and in the historical turmoil of their times, their faith in progress towards a better man and world was shaken. Occasionally, though, their Pyrrhonism approximated a creed of inhospitable negation rather than suspended judgment (epoche) leading to tranquillity of mind (ataraxia). A recent study of the “sociable circles” of the younger English Romantics – Hunt and his circle as well as Shelley and his – confirms this widening gap between the ideal and reality. The realms of ink and imagination were those of daily experience, including their broken dreams. These communities had been founded in opposition to social and religious institutions that were felt to be corrupt, but the relationships within these circles, as between Shelley and Byron or Keats and Barry Cornwall, let alone between the poets and their wives and other relatives, were increasingly troubled. There is at least some truth in Claire Clairmont’s observation in a recently discovered fragmentary memoir that these relationships were characterized by “lying, meanness, cruelty and treachery”.145 Much the same applies to the group of early German Romantics in Jena and Berlin formed in opposition to the majority of Neoclassical critics: August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, Caroline Schlegel (later Schelling), Friedrich Schiller, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling, Ludwig Tieck, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Novalis, and Friedrich Schleiermacher. Around 1801 and 1802, their group, with its high initial expectation and oaths of friendship, broke up through backbiting, treachery, betrayal, mistrust, envy, and death.146 Private squabbles without the arbitrium of a moderator or public as judge were no productive Streitkultur in the sense of the Classical Tradition’s art of arguing. 144 Byron, Don Juan, 15. 92. 3. Reference to Virgil, Aeneid, I. 574. 145 Quoted in: Daisy Hay, Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives, London 2010, 308. 146 Gerhard Kaiser, Literarische Romantik, 17.

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What has been correctly observed of the Enlightenment may also be said of Romanticism: that its original optimism faded during the movement, and that the Enlightenment retreat from a belief in mankind’s progress through reason was mirrored in a Romantic retreat from the belief in mankind’s progress through imagination. The consequence has been a progressive Metaphysikverlust since the nineteenth century. The development of Romanticism was a downward evolution, a descensus ad inferos, opposed to Platonic visions of ascension on the ladder of perfection. Virgil Nemoianu, who diagnosed two consecutive phases of European Romanticism, does not see their coexistence throughout the Romantic Period, but correctly describes the decline from vision to accommodation: We can say that Biedermeier (or later romanticism) was the secularization of a secularization. The energetic and concentrated spurt of high romanticism, the new human model of all-embracing total renewal (which, according to Abrams, was the secularization of the Christian plot), was soon lowered into the realm of the possible. An extreme way of putting it is, that in the long run, core romanticism could only be a process of decline and melancholy, because the pure paradigm was unattainable. Romanticism must become silence – or accommodation.147

This is also the case with American Romanticism, and explains why the later American Romantics – Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville – insisted on the reality and ultimate ineradicability of the “power of blackness”148 in man. It is true that Poe and Melville were Romantic Disillusionists and Hawthorne a Positive Romantic, whose conversations with the sceptic Melville attest to his strained efforts to maintain and teach his Christian faith. But their common Dark Romantic fiction argued against the optimism of the Platonic American Transcendentalists, manifested in their recourse to themes and techniques of the Gothic novel with its powerful and ever-present primeval demonism, subterranean vaults underneath splendid castles or churches, dark impenetrable forests, banditti and inquisitors, and dark Gothic villains and villainesses. The black characters in Melville’s “Benito Cereno” (1856), Babo and Atufal, are not only poor victims of slavery, commanding the reader’s sympathy, but, with the cruelty and guile of their revolt, they also embody the power of evil in man and history. The haunting dark forests in Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” (1835) and The Scarlet Letter (1850) symbolize primeval sin and the re-enactment of the Fall of man, forever to be repeated, although his Gothic, like Coleridge’s, was a Christian Gothic allowing for the possibility of weak man’s redemption. Nevertheless, any Emersonian perfectibility, Paradise Regained in this world, is then quite impossible. Wars, 147 Nemoianu, The Taming of Romanticism, 29. 148 Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness, New York 1958.

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riots, bloodshed, and murder will not disappear in a millennial paradise, and Harper’s Ferry (1859) and the subsequent events of the American Civil War (1861–1865) discredit […] the Republic’s faith implied, Which holds that Man is naturally good, And – more – is Nature’s Roman, never to be scourged.149

“Misgivings” (MS 1860), another poem in Melville’s Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866), treats the autumn scene of John Brown’s raid and hanging symbolically as foreshadowing more bloodshed, chaos, and crime, turning even the prophetic romantic child’s attention to nature’s ever-present dark side. The poem’s autumnal imagery concentrates on decline and decay : When ocean-clouds over inland hills Sweep storming in late autumn brown, And horror the sodden valley fills, And the spire falls crashing in the town, I muse upon my country’s ills – The tempest bursting from the waste of Time On the world’s fairest hope linked with man’s foulest crime. Nature’s dark side is heeded now – (Ah! optimist-cheer disheartened flown) – A child may read the moody brow Of yon black mountain lone. With shouts the torrents down the gorges go, And storms are formed behind the storm we feel: The hemlock shakes in the rafter, the oak in the driving keel.150

It has recently been pointed out in a study of the theatrical practices of the Romantic Period that Positive Romanticism’s cult of the prophetic child, the mighty poet and seer blessed of numerous lyrics had a dark underside: child exploitation and child abuse as in The Haunted Tower (1789), the popular English musical version of the Marquis de Sade’s La tour enchant8e.151 Whereas Positive Romanticism had seen everything as being in a state of growth and evolution, Romantic Disillusionism and (in its wake) the Neoromanticism of the Decadence and Fin de SiHcle saw things in a state of decline and decay. Both views, although opposed, were the heritage of many concepts: the Romantic one of natura naturans, Romantic narcissism and return from 149 Melville, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, The House-Top, 1866, lines 25–26, in: Works, Standard Edition, London 1922–1924, XVI. 64. 150 Ibid., Misgivings, ibid. XVI. 7. 151 Frederick Burwick, Playing to the Crowd: London Popular Theatre 1780–1830, Basingstoke and London 2011, 9–26.

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general to individual nature, Romantic doubt of the cognitive and reformative power of general reason, and, as a consequence in the history of European science, Romanticism’s exploration of the unconscious.152 The change of paradigms that took place in the 1820s and 1830s, the “taming of Romanticism” and “death of the beauty that Romanticism created”,153 did not come unheralded. The seeds of Romantic Disillusionism were present from the beginning in Rousseau, Henry Mackenzie, and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, all showing the failure of worldly ideals. The sentimental novel’s branch, the Gothic novel, with its sad, broken d8nouements, attests a similar awareness. It featured light and splendour above ground juxtaposed with darkness and crime below, where subterranean passages and caverns hid robbery, murder, torture, abduction, and rape, subverting all paradisiacal ideals. And it placed lordly castles alongside saintly abbeys so that both could hide the most abject atrocities in a nature and under a fate indifferent to man. In psychological terms, Gothic castles could be places of womb-like security and healthy retirement from ordinary life, and, according to a different perception, dark places of incarceration where men could be locked away from and denied an ordinary life.154 Some villains and villainesses of the Gothic novel achieve grandeur of revolt against patriarchal conventions that appear at least as evil as their crimes, so that Charlotte Dacre’s Victoria, with her heroic willingness to suffer and carrying a telling name, was one of the numerous precursors of the Byronic hero.155 In the wake of the Gothic novel, the Marquis de Sade opposed man’s dark and criminal side with his enlightened and virtuous one, notably in Les cent-vingt journ8es de Sodome (MS 1784–1785), written in the Bastille and featuring respectable members of society practising sexual perversities in the dark dungeon of a respectable castle. With its accountant’s registers of criminal violence and rapes, the novel negotiates irrationality against the Enlightenment’s cult of reason and belief in human progress. In the self-styled philosopher’s view of a violent and criminal nature indifferent to man in his isolation, it is not virtue but vice–in the sense of the gratification of evil drives and instincts – that is natural and leads to “happiness below”.156 It is this irrational dark side that gradually corrupts the light surface; the shady unconscious, also metaphorically named subconscious, slowly undermines the enlightened, conscious, waking world. This is seen in Ludwig 152 Henri Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious, London 1970, 279. 153 Virgil Nemoianu, The Taming of Romanticism, passim, and J.J. McGann, Rethinking Romanticism, in: Byron and Romanticism, ed. James Soderholm, Cambridge 2002, 248. 154 David Punter – Glennis Byron, The Gothic, Malden MA 2004, 261–262. 155 Kim Ian Michasiw’s Introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Charlotte Dacre, Zofloya, or, the Moor, 1806, New York 1997, XXX. 156 Sade (against Pope), La nouvelle Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu, suivie de l’histoire de Juliette, sa sœur, ou les prosp8rit8s du vice (En Hollande 1797).

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Tieck’s Richardsonian epistolary novel William Lovell (1795–1796), with its sentimental, Gothic, English hero and a dark secret unveiled by the infernal, revenge-seeking Waterloo at the novel’s end,157 as well as in his novellas “Der blonde Eckbert” (1797) and “Der Runenberg” (1804), with their themes and motifs of disorientation in dark forests, material and sexual greed, irresistible irrational drives, fateful guilt, uncanny contingencies, and ultimate madness. The sensibility of “men and women of feeling” could produce vice as well as virtue, including the atrocities of what has been called “la sensibilit8 r8volutionnaire”.158 Diving into his unconscious, characterized by subterranean and submarine imagery throughout the three-decker novel, Tieck’s William Lovell discovers the amoral nature of man in the original, pre-rational equality of good and evil. The man of feeling and the sensitive poet becomes increasingly aware of the corruption lurking in the best of human natures, a corruption that will gradually take hold of and destroy him. As in Sigmund Freud’s later – and by no means original – theory of the unconscious as the seat of the id or instinctual drives, the id is unorganized, being the dark, uncivilized, inaccessible part of our personality where contradictory impulses coexist unreconciled and unbalanced: Wie im Abgrunde der See Geschmeide und Kostbarkeiten unter Schlamm und neben verweseten Gerippen glänzen, so seltsam liegt alles in meinem Innern durcheinander. Es funkelt Gold in wilden Trümmern, Tief im verborgenen Gestein, Ich sehe ferne Schätze schimmern, Mich lockt der rätselhafte Schein. Und hinter mir fällt es zusammen, Ha! Um mich her ein enges Grab, Die Welt, der Tag entflieht, die Flammen Der Kerzen sinken, sterben ab.159

In the wake of Dark Romanticism, the Victorian Gothic, with its representations of the human unconscious, found such popularity as it offered both authors and readers the possibility to negotiate what Victorian decency and norms forbade: wild erotomania; rape; psychic vampirism; variants of sexuality such as homosexuality, bisexuality, paedophilia, masochism and sadism; variants of gender such as hermaphroditism and transsexuality as well as cross-dressing; and 157 The name Lovell refers to both the hero of Clara Reeve’s Gothic novel The Old English Baron (1777) and to the seducer Lovelace in Samuel Richardson’s sentimental novel Clarissa Harlowe (1748–1749). As such, it marks the deep-rooted vicinity and potential of good and evil in men of feeling. 158 Pierre Trahard, La sensibilit8 r8volutionnaire, Paris 1936. 159 Tieck, William Lovell, 1795–1796, ed. cit. 371.

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variants of the officially taught gender binary, such as men shaking and trembling like women under the shock of the cruel or supernatural.160 Horace Walpole’s Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto (1765) and Gothic drama The Mysterious Mother (1768) had concentrated on the themes of rape and incest, thus provocatively breaking the Neoclassical rule of decorum, incurring the enmity of Enlightenment critics. His tragedy’s epigraph from Virgil, “Sit mihi fas audita loqui”, expresses his daring offence against Neoclassical propriety, laying open (like Sophocles and Euripides before him) repressed parts of human nature that others dared to only reveal behind closed doors. Moreover, his tragedy’s titular heroine, the Countess of Narbonne, is a heterogeneous mixture of highest virtue and sensibility on the one hand and low, sex-driven vice paradoxically combined with Lady-Macbeth-like unsexed hardness on the other. Without any indications of hypocrisy, her public virtue hides a secret, morally chaotic abyss. William Beckford’s Gothic novel Vathek (1786) had opposed the effeminate paedophilic Gulchenrouz with the cruel, heterosexual titular hero, rewarding him with whole ages of sexual pleasure with young boys, thereby insinuating rather than expressly naming Gulchenrouz’s erotic preoccupations. Beckford thus managed to vent his own paedophilic predilections, projecting them onto the Other in the tradition of eighteenth-century Orientalism.161 The Gothic novels of Matthew Gregory Lewis and Ann Radcliffe had revolved around the infernal greed and perverse pleasures of socially and outwardly respectable men and women that were satisfied in dark caves, secret chambers, and hidden vaults. Lewis’s even more popular Gothic drama The Castle Spectre (1797) had dealt with rape, incest, and murder committed by a nobleman, a member of an ancien r8gime peerage that legitimized his prerogatives by posing as a role model to commoners. The play is fiercely anti-aristocratic and implicitly anti-heteronormative. And John Polidori’s Gothic tale Ernestus Berchtold, or, The Modern Oedipus (1819), published in the same year as his better-known “Vampyre”, had told the tragedy of a double incest, drawing on his employer Lord Byron’s alleged love affair with his half-sister Augusta.162 The Victorians, or rather “other Victorians”,163 so fascinated by pornography and freak shows, could not do without that Gothic, which encapsulated and presented anti-normative, socially ostracized yet omnipresent and ineradicable realities that stood in the way of all Victorian concepts of 160 Ardel Haefele-Thomas, Queer Victorian Gothic, in: Andrew Smith – William Hughes (eds.), The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, Edinburgh 2012, 142–155. 161 Donna Landry, William Beckford’s Vathek, in: Makdisi, Saree – Nussbaum, Felicity (eds.), The Arabian Nights in Historical Context, Oxford 2008, 184. 162 For the subversive nature of the Piranesian Gothic and its infame scelus see Vijay Mishra, The Gothic Sublime, Albany NY 1994, passim. 163 Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in MidNineteenth-Century England, New York NY 1966.

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progress. Publications such as Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert’s aforementioned Die Symbolik des Traumes (1814), a pioneering work of dream analysis pre-Freud, and Catherine Crowe’s The Night Side of Nature (1848), a source collection of Victorian ghost stories, were deeply disquieting for moralists and meliorists. And so were Gothic stories such as Elizabeth Gaskell’s “The Grey Woman” (1861), featuring a sadistic Frenchman of the Sade succession and a somewhat too-close intimacy between his two female victims that was published in the mesmerist Charles Dickens’s weekly periodical All the Year Round, or Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire (1897), which narrated the fate of a poor and unwilling femme fatale infected by psychic vampirism. Read in light of what Tieck and Mesmer were already familiar with, the end of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Gothic novella “The Haunted and the Haunters, or, The House and the Brain” (1856) reveals its symbolic representation of the human unconscious as a carefully hidden room in a backyard closed with multiple seals. Inside, good and evil are chaotically jumbled together, like splendour and rot, around a hidden tablet with a compass that points wildly in all directions.164 The unconscious has no moral orientation, and its evil strength spreads its almost irresistible will in all directions, potentially corrupting even best men and women. The incongruous chaos within is outwardly reflected in faces at once beautiful and ugly, attractive and repulsive, divine and infernal. The corrupting Shadow, with its evil serpent eyes and immense power, is omnipresent, haunting his victims again and again. In his later, esoteric novel A Strange Story (1862), which Charles Dickens also published in All the Year Round together with Great Expectations, Bulwer-Lytton described the unconscious as “mind”, a morally indifferent chaos of brute impulses in constant battle with, and often overcoming, “soul”, the moral regulative in man. In a trance, the first-person narrator – initially a crude advocate for empirical science and rational progress – has a vision of the interior of the human brain “with all its labyrinth of cells”, which reveals to him why the gradually corrupted villain Margrave (and later Margrave’s oriental nurse Ayesha) are such heterogeneous mixtures of beauty and deformity, health and decrepitude.165 Such a construction of human nature and such a view of the limitations of nineteenth-century science does not allow for progress: And I saw that the mind was storming the soul in some terrible rebellious war – all of thought, of passion, of desire […] were surging up […] as in a siege. […] And I saw that the soul, sorely tempted, looked afar for escape from the subjects it had ever so ill

164 Bulwer-Lytton, The Haunted and the Haunters, or, The House and the Brain, 1856, in: Novels and Tales, London 1868, 364–365. 165 Bulwer-Lytton, A Strange Story, 1862, X. 114.

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controlled, and who sought to reduce to their vassal the power which had lost authority as their king. And I could feel its terror in the sympathy of my own terror […]166

The pre-Byronic titular hero of Joanna Baillie’s Gothic tragedy De Monfort (1798), highly esteemed by Baillie’s admirer Byron though ill-suited to the Romantic Period stage like his own dramas, is psychoanalysed as a mixture of extreme virtues and extreme vices, by turns sociable and lonely, forgiving and revengeful, proud and condescending, and loving and incestuous. Inspired by her famous brother, Dr Matthew Baillie, who specialized in morbid anatomy and was consulted about Byron’s sanity, Joanna Baillie’s Plays on the Passions (1798– 1812) specialized in morbid psychology, digging into the dark caverns underneath all human virtue and splendour. Her heroes, with their monologues opening the “windows of their souls”, find no fixed identities – neither the noble De Monfort (1798) destroyed by monomanic hatred, nor the noble Ethwald (1802) destroyed by monomanic ambition, nor the noble Orra (1812) destroyed by monomanic fear.167 They confirm the sceptic David Hume’s observation in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739) that identity and continuity are metaphysical fictions that stabilize the heterogeneous mind. Men, according to what has been called Hume’s bundle theory of the self, “are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement”.168 In postulating this, Hume paved the way for Freud’s theory of the unconscious and unorganized chaotic id forever frustrating man’s conscious efforts to reach rationality and homogeneity. Here, the empiricist argued from typically Preromantic self-analytical interiority : […] when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. […] There is properly no simplicity in it [the mind] at one time, nor identity in different, whatever natural propension we may have to imagine that simplicity or identity.169

The Preromantic poet and philosopher James Beattie, whose influence on the Positive Romantics can hardly be overrated, called up Plato to argue against Hume’s scepticism in his Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth (1771), although, like most Augustans, he found fault with Plato’s lack of common sense. Following Hume’s Treatise three years later, Edward Young’s Night-Thoughts (1742) heralded the rise of the Preromantic Gothic, where a cult of nightly 166 Ibid. X. 116. 167 Isobel Armstrong, Joanna Baillie, Byron and Satanic Drama, 10 and 45. 168 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, vol. I, part IV, Of Personal Identity, 1739, ed. A.D. Lindsay, Everyman’s Library, London 1911, 1961, I. 239. 169 Ibid. I. 239–240.

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reveries replaced enlightened rational thought, and imagery of the return of repressed terrors saw man as “From different Natures marvelously mixt”.170 When, in his Letter to John Murray on W.L. Bowles’s Strictures on Pope (1821), Lord Byron opposed honest “variety” to hypocritical “cant” he had this Humean and Gothic antithetically mixed nature of man in mind, one that he had intense personal experience of in his own shift of poetic schools, as well as in his bisexuality. And when, in his anonymous John Bull’s Letter to Lord Byron (1821), John Gibson Lockhart blamed the laudable Neoclassical satirist Byron for the alleged “cant”, or rather “humbug”, of his previous Romantic Childe-Harold poses, he revealed his Tory conservatism in arguing based on the assumption of a homogeneous human nature.171 Lockhart could not imagine a chameleon Byron and thus assumed the Neoclassical satirist, akin to himself “the Scorpion” Lockhart, to be the real Byron and the Romantic poet of Weltschmerz and Todessehnsucht to be an assumed actor’s mask. Byron and the Byronic hero, however, were characters marked by a mixture of virtues and vices, as later exemplified in Julius Brenzaida, Emily Bront[’s Prince of Angora on the imaginary island of Gondal, a noble hero and gallant lover yet an insidious murderer and adulterer – his own dark double. In the later English Decadent Movement, influenced by Byron and Emily Bront[, Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean (1885) saw the heterogeneity of human nature symbolized by the Artemis or Venus of Ephesus, a huntress goddess representing both man’s amity and enmity to animals; alternately caring and destroying, loving and cruel, “expression of two allied yet contrasted elements of human temper and experience”.172 And in the French Decadent Movement, Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly created the protagonists of his scandalous novels and tales as inexplicable mixtures of angel and devil, repentance and pride in guilt, admittedly under the influence of Byron, especially Byron’s Manfred. The Faustian Jean Sombreval in Un prÞtre mari8 (1865) and the Duchesse de Sierra-Leone in Les Diaboliques (1874) are the most prominent and enigmatic examples. Reading the letters of the Romantic poets – be they Platonists or Pyrrhonists, Keats or Byron, Clemens Brentano or Kleist – we see a general shift from the autonomous Enlightenment subject to a pre-modern subjectivity no longer defined by reason.173 The Romantic letter writer comes to wear every changing 170 Young, The Complaint, or, Night-Thoughts, 1742, I. 71, ed. Stephen Cornford, Cambridge 1959, 39. See David Punter, The Literature of Terror, vol. 1 The Gothic Tradition, 2nd edn. London 1996, 35–37. 171 [Lockhart], John Bull’s Letter to Lord Byron, 1821, ed. Alan Lang Strout, Norman OK, 1947, 63–65, 80–82. 172 Pater, Marius the Epicurean, 1885, chapter 14, in: Works, ed. cit. II. 241. 173 Karl Heinz Bohrer, Der romantische Brief: Die Entstehung ästhetischer Subjektivität, Munich and Vienna 1987, 13 and 99.

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mask, imaginatively making and reinventing him or herself – a histrionic art learned early by the natural Wordsworthian child and an awareness that might explain the explosive increase of literary impersonations and forgeries in the Romantic Period: As if his whole vocation Were endless imitation.174

In the wake of the Enlightenment concept of a general human nature and its deflation of the virtus and pietas of the exceptional hero, there arose what has been correctly described as a cult of scandalous celebrity or notoriety, a transition from the traditional cult of the hero to modern fan culture. The fall of the gods transformed “a traditional cosmology of heavenly bodies into a secular cosmology of human bodies and social space”.175 Lucifer, the light bearer, showed his even more fascinating dark side, like Romanticism itself. Scandal and vice, rather than a blotless reputation and virtue, became a means of securing immortality, as well as a saleable commodity for publishers. It was this modern mixture of vice and virtue that electrified the readers of the two first cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in 1812 and the fan community of Byron, for whom Childe Harold and Byron were identical: glorious and brilliant sinners. Thus the individuum became a dividuum; single split into double and more – Byron’s “broken mirror”.176 This explains the appearance of the doppelganger in Romanticism. In German literature, the doppelganger in the Romantic sense of a split human nature first appeared in the works of the typically Preromantic novelist Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, alias Jean Paul, especially in Siebenkäs (1796–1797), where the term “Doppeltgänger” is coined, and in Titan (1800– 1803). The poor man’s lawyer Siebenkäs changes roles with a doppelganger with the telling name Leibgeber, simulating illness and death. In Titan, Leibgeber reappears as Schoppe, who falls mad upon meeting his double Siebenkäs again. Potential madness and death are thus associated with the doppelganger from the very beginning. Jean Paul’s novels teem with scary doppelgangers, portraits, wax figures, reflections and multiple images in mirrors. And where these doppelgangers appear the comic novels, though written on the models of Tobias Smollett and Laurence Sterne, assume Gothic and tragic traits. In his autobiographical and critical writings, particularly in Vorschule der Ästhetik (1804, 174 W. Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, MS 1802–1804, 1807, lines 106–107, in: Poetical Works, ed. T. Hutchinson – E. de Selincourt, Oxford Standard Authors, London 1971, 461. See Angela Esterhammer, Identity Crises: Celebrity, Anonymity, Doubles, and Frauds in European Romanticism, in: The Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism, 771–787. 175 Clara Tuite, Lord Byron and Scandalous Celebrity, Cambridge 2014, 1. 176 Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 1812–1818, 3. 33. 1.

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1813) and Selberlebensbeschreibung (posth. 1826), Jean Paul commented on the split nature of man and the world in general, man’s autoscopic condition, his own split nature, and the chaotic unconscious (alongside the rational conscious) as the poet’s first and foremost impulse. In his view, poetry is akin to dreaming, and dreaming is involuntary poetry :177 Der Mensch ist nie allein: das Selbstbewusstsein macht, daß immer zwei Ichs in der Stube sind.178 Das Mächtigste im Dichter, welches dem Menschen die gute und die böse Seele einbläset, ist gerade das Unbewußte.179

E.T.A. Hoffmann’s novella “Der Sandmann” (1816) was in many ways inspired by Jean Paul. It blurs the distinction between a human creature (Clara) and an automaton (Olimpia) by exchanging their characteristics in the perspective of Nathanael. The final dismembering of Olimpia at the hands of her creator Spalanzani (referring to the Italian anatomist Lazzaro Spallanzani) casts doubt on the traditional assumption of a human identity in the sense of homogeneity. Man viewed as a jointed doll, or Gliederpuppe, capable of being disassembled, is a major motif in Hoffmann’s fiction.180 In the same year, 1816, Mary Shelley made her Victor Frankenstein synthesize an artificial man out of random parts of dead bodies, a heterogeneous creature galvanized by (recently discovered) electricity. Neither Hoffmann’s Olimpia nor Mary Shelley’s Monster need a divine afflatus but only the engineering genius of their scientific creators or manipulators – and that at a time when numerous experiments were made to create automatons with human functions.181 And these “Modern Prometheuses” – the experimenter Frankenstein or Hoffmann’s mesmerizer Alban – are irresponsible and destructive in sharp contrast to the classical Prometheus; they act in their own interests rather than those of suffering mankind. At around the same time painters like Goya and G8ricault delighted in the depiction of scenes of battle, cannibalism, execution, and dissection – human bodies split and dismembered so as to doubt both a beneficent creation and a norm of anthropological homogeneity. In the words of Delacroix, Baudelaire, and W.B. Yeats, a terrible and dark beauty was born, replacing the older concept of beauty rather as opposed to sublimity, thus expressing the new view of the illogically split nature of man. The Romantic fascination with grotesque distortion and hybrid deformity was 177 Ren8 Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, 1750–1950, New Haven CTand London 1955– 1991, II. 102. See Albert B8guin, L’.me romantique et le rÞve, 1937, Geneva 1993. 178 Jean Paul, Aphorism, quoted from an unknown source in Andrew J. Webber, The Doppelgänger : Double Visions in German Literature, Oxford 1996, 56. 179 Jean Paul, Vorschule der Ästhetik, 1804, Berlin 1813, beginning of § 13. 180 Lieselotte Sauer, Marionetten, Maschinen, Automaten: Der künstliche Mensch in der deutschen und englischen Romantik, Bonn 1983, 210–211. 181 Ibid. passim.

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therefore more than a mere matter of style, a neo-baroque blending of forms and genres created by writers who “searched for patterns and inspirations in models earlier than those of the eighteenth century”.182 Operating on the basis of such scepticism, Gothic horror and schwarze Romantik gained in strength. They survived beneath mainstream Victorian moral decency, rationality, and optimism and became resurgent in the Decadence and Fin de SiHcle, challenging the age’s boundless confidence in scientific and cultural progress. In the wake of Romantic Disillusionism, Friedrich Nietzsche called renewed attention to the death force that counteracted man’s vitality in an aimless and absurd world, and redefined man, the modern subject, as multiplicity (versus homogeneity) and dividuum (versus individuum).183 Henri Bergson, Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Simmel, and George Bernard Shaw pitted their vitalistic Lebensphilosophie, inspired by Nietzsche, against the death force that dominated Decadent culture. Freud reactivated the Preromantic and Romantic exploration of the dark caverns of the soul, in which irrational drives including rape and murder lurked, linking it to the death force counteracting man’s life force. In The Island of Dr Moreau, H.G. Wells demonstrated the devolution inherent in evolution; the cycle of repeated regression of scientifically advanced men to barbarous animals. And in The Nigger of the Narcissus and Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad, following Nietzsche, showed the destructive force of fear and the devolution of all civilization to a primitive state of war and anthropophagy. Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s “The Haunted and the Haunters” (1857) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), formerly classified as trivial tales, are valuable in their representations of this split: progress undermined by fears of regression, reason undermined by lurking madness, science challenged by the occult, human identity doubted by insights into man’s heterogeneity and bisexuality, the conscious seen as the visible part of a larger and stronger unconscious hidden in darkness beyond the scope of reason. For all his boasting of modern rationality and military courage, mirrored in his doppelganger servant and dog, Bulwer’s very masculine narrator, with his love of daylight, clear thinking, and Macaulay’s Essays, has fits of panicking horror in a dark, haunted London house when confronted with the phantasmagoria of evil. The single-sex construction of masculinity collapses when narrator, servant, and dog shake and panic like women; clear order reverts to dark chaos. His dark bedchamber, a place of sweet dreams and rest, turns into a Henry Fuseli-like place of wild dreams and hor-

182 Mirosława Modrzewska, Byron and the Baroque, Frankfurt am Main 2013, 98. 183 Roberto SanchiÇo Mart&nez, “Aufzeichnungen eines Vielfachen”: Zu Friedrich Nietzsches Poetologie des Selbst, Bielefeld 2013.

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ror184 – just as it does with the narrative’s bedside reader, who is plunged into the sealed-off space of the unconscious. Back in daylight, the narrator recovers his masculinity and tries to explain these visions by recourse to the modern discoveries of mesmerism and electricity, but the reader is made to suspect that they are, in reality, decent, bourgeois projections of his own unconscious evil in suppressed fantasies of greed, fraud, and murder. At the tale’s end the narrator seems to have eradicated evil and fear by destroying the heavily locked mysterious room, together with the similarly secured tablet and its anathema, which can also be read as symbols of his unconscious. The final victory of reason and virtue over mystery and vice is Negative Romantic Irony, just as the final victory of day over night would be unbelievable in this tale dominated by liminal candlelight scenes. When Jonathan Harker, Stoker’s rational, English, middle-class lawyer, travels into multiracial Transylvania in the gigantic Austro-Hungarian Empire, he enters a liminal country introduced in twilight. It mirrors the British Empire – expected to be given stability and permanence by modern, rational science, but instead threatened from within by clashes of heterogeneous cultures. And it is mirrored in Dr Seward’s patient Renfield, a man vacilating between clear reason and mad zoophagy. Harker’s first perception of Transylvania is distanced and arrogant in its travelogue-esque description of a medley of “picturesque barbarians” and their “superstitions”, soon to be shaken by the experience of illogical occurrences. Count Dracula is an old man with the strength of a youth. He avails himself of modern science and walks London as a respectable Victorian gentleman, but he carries atavistic layers of homo homini lupus below the veneer of modern civilization, subverting all Victorian belief in progress. And, just as in the case of the madman Renfield, the animal below the surface of the human becomes evident when Count Dracula climbs the walls of his castle like a lizard. Dr Seward, the modern, rational physician, calls for the help of his old teacher Van Helsing, who has not yet reduced all phenomena to physical causes and thrown the past overboard. Harker, a prisoner in Dracula’s old Transylvanian castle, notes in his diary : It is nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance. And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill.185

Identity and gender roles are no longer stable. Jonathan Harker and Arthur Holmwood change characters, alternating between sanity and madness, as do Lucy Westenraa and Mina Murray when bitten by the vampire, alternating between sweetness and aggression: 184 Nick Freeman, The Victorian Ghost Story, in: The Victorian Gothic, 94–95. 185 Stoker, Dracula, 1897, chapter III, London: Jarrolds, 1966, 39.

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Lucy Westernraa, but yet how changed. The sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness.186

Furthermore, an ungovernable sexual drive makes Harker lose his Victorian decency when three vampire women approach his bed in an attempt to suck his blood while he plans to rape them. Vampirism, the blood-sucking embrace that rejuvenates exhausted or dead men and women, challenges the Victorian doctrine of the rational control of the sexual instinct and the decent performance of the sexual act constrained to marriage. The novel’s end, with its exaggerated celebration of the ultimate triumph of self-sacrificing commitment and morality over the powers of darkness, is shaped by Romantic Irony insofar as the reader has been made aware of the permanent existence of these powers. They can be temporarily repressed, but will only break loose again. The reader must doubt the narrator’s assurance that Dracula, so often dead, will never have another resurrection, just as he doubts the concluding moral of the wicked Juliette’s repentance after her virtuous sister Justine’s undeserved death in the Marquis de Sade’s Les infortunes de la vertu (MS 1787), or the affirmation of the lesbian vampire Carmilla’s death at the end of Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella where the virtuous Laura seems to wait secretly for her demonic lover’s resurrection.187 Ranking the Imperial Gothic romance of his time with its expression of fears about an inverse invasion and the loss of Empire above Victorian fictional realism, Andrew Lang observed in 1887 that we are “civilized at top with the old barbarian under our clothes”.188 Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, who investigates numerous London crimes that originate in the colonies of the British Empire, is a typical literary character created on that anthropological model – a Horace Walpole that carries his own doppelganger within himself. In the Romantic Period it was Romantic Irony that mirrored and promoted the development outlined above. This was the term coined for the believer’s or sceptic’s introspection, as well as the refusal to reconcile contradictions and opposites; the poet’s simultaneity in creating and de-creating, affirming and doubting.189 In an open universe that broke the confines and restrictions of the Enlightenment world view, Romantic Irony was a response to sustain contradictions that evaded solutions.190 It was very similar to the distancing humour that Jean Paul described in his Vorschule der Ästhetik (1804, 1813) and admired in Laurence Sterne, one of his favourite authors. Irony, it has been aptly ob186 Ibid. chapter XVI, 190. 187 Ardel Thomas, Queer Victorian Gothic, in: The Victorian Gothic, 150. 188 Lang, Realism and Romance, 1887, in Contemporary Review, 52 (1887), 689–690. Quoted by Patrick Brantlinger, Imperial Gothic, in: The Victorian Gothic, 206. 189 Anne K. Mellor, English Romantic Irony, Cambridge MA 1980, 18. 190 Peter L. Thorslev, Romantic Contraries, chapter 6 The Open Universe and Romantic Irony, New Haven CT and London 1984, 142–186.

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served, “is the other side of Romanticism, attuned to rationality rather than feeling, to calculation rather than sentiment, to self-reflection rather than selfexpression”.191 The Romantic Period was keenly aware of the irreconcilable contradiction between the ideal and reality, illusion and reality, expectation and result. Its narcissistic artists, psychoanalytical scholars of Romanticism have observed, were keenly aware of the dangerous contradiction between reality and representation in the creative act, so that their minds simultaneously created and de-created fictions.192 We have already observed this in Wackenroder’s and Tieck’s novel Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (1797), where the Positive Romantic concept of artistry (exemplified by the biography and beliefs of the old painter Raphael) is finally contradicted by a Negative Romantic concept of artistry (exemplified by the biography and confessions of the modern composer Berglinger and his repeated experience of a pre-Byronic fall from dreams and ideals into bleak reality): ‘Es ist wohl leider gewiß; man kann mit aller Anstrengung unserer geistigen Fittiche der Erde nicht entkommen; sie zieht uns mit Gewalt zurück, und wir fallen wieder unter den gemeinsten Haufen der Menschen.’193

With the tragic failure of her love affairs complementing the tragic failure of her political feminism – contributing to her early suicide – Karoline von Günderrode left a bitter symbolist poem about the fall of a modern montgolfier, entitled “Der Luftschiffer” (MS ca 1802–1804). He, the poem’s speaker, reaches the final insight that the law of gravitation is effective in all domains of human life, which include millennial expectations and exalted Platonic philosophy : Aber ach! Es ziehet mich hernieder Nebel überschleiert meinen Blick Und der Erde Grenzen seh ich wieder Wolken treiben mich zu ihr zurück. Wehe! Das Gesetz der Schwere Es behauptet neu sein Recht Keiner darf sich ihm entziehen Von dem irdischen Geschlecht.194

191 Gary Handwerk, Romantic Irony, in: The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 5 Romanticism, ed. Marshall Brown, Cambridge 2000, 203. 192 David Punter, The Romantic Unconscious: A Study in Narcissism and Patriarchy, Hemel Hempstead 1989, 167–170. 193 Wackenroder – Tieck, Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders, 1797, ed. cit. 111. 194 Günderrode, Nachlass, Der Luftschiffer, lines 13–20, in: Sämtliche Werke und ausgewählte Studien, ed. Walter Morgenthaler, Basel and Frankfurt am Main 1990–1991, I. 390.

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And, in Byron’s wake, Heinrich Heine mocked all Positive Romantic Naturergriffenheit – the expansion of the soul in contemplation of the sublimity of the universe – in a “woman of sensibility” sublimely elated by viewing a sunset. Soberly analysed, she saw nothing but part of a disillusioning, absurd circle, formulated with Popean bathos, the parodic “art of falling”: Das Fräulein stand am Meere Und seufzte lang und bang, Es rührte sie so sehre Der Sonnenuntergang. Mein Fräulein! sein Sie munter, Das ist ein altes Stück; Hier vorne gehrt sie unter Und kehrt von hinten zurück.195

Friedrich Schlegel, the earliest theorist of Romanticism in his Socratic Gespräch über die Poesie (1800), was far ahead of his time in developing the concept of what he seminally termed “die romantische Ironie”, illustrated by his Blakean reading of “Mythologie” and “die Arabeske”. Irony implies humorous distance, self-reflectivity, self-parody, renouncement of any opinionated stance of a dogmatic claim to absolute truth in favour of intellectual mobility, and acceptance of contradictions by transcending them. Friedrich Schlegel thus invented the word “Transzendentalpoesie”, analogous to “Transzendentalphilosophie”. “Ironie ist klares Bewußsein der ewigen Agilität, des unendlich vollen Chaos”.196 Socratic Irony, as he also called it in distinction to mere rhetorical irony, unites sensibility and reason, and humorousness and earnestness, in the mythmaking poet’s constant readiness to alternate between taking a serious stance and then parodying himself – to build up and then to demolish illusions – to the annoyance of narrow dogmatically cemented minds in search of uniformity. His literary models were Elizabethan and Jacobean plays whose illusions were destroyed by inductions, as well as self-parodic anti-novels by Cervantes, Sterne, and Diderot: Sie [die Sokratische Ironie] ist die freieste aller Lizenzen, denn durch sie setzt man sich über sich selbst hinweg; und doch auch die gesetzlichste, denn sie ist unbedingt notwendig. Es ist ein sehr gutes Zeichen, wenn die harmonisch Platten gar nicht wissen, wie sie diese stete Selbstparodie zu nehmen haben […]197

195 Heine, Das Fräulein, MS ca 1830, in: Sämtliche Schriften, IV. 327. 196 Friedrich Schlegel, Ideen, 1800, Nr 69, in: Werke in zwei Bänden, ed. Wolfgang Hecht, Bibliothek deutscher Klassiker. Berlin and Weimar 1980, I. 271. 197 Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Fragmente, 1797, Nr 108, I. 182.

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The Romantic return to myth from reason was no na"ve regression into the childhood of man and civilization, but had to be aware of its adulthood when creating new myths rather than reviving old ones. The Enlightenment had taken place and could not be reversed; the original rhythms and spontaneity of the child and savage could not be authentically recovered but consciously reconstructed in the act of new mythopoetic writing. Thus the cultural integration of enlightened reason helped man write poetry with the awareness of his art, observing himself in the act of writing with Socratic philosophical detachment and urbanity, what he called “den göttlichen Hauch der Ironie” and “transzendentale Buffonerie”,198 and what Matthew Arnold was later to christen “disinterestedness”. Romantic Irony allowed man to transcend the contractions of the real and the ideal, of fragmentation and unity, of appearance and reality, supported by a firm belief that all reality and all fragmentation as experienced daily in the world would eventually be integrated in ideality and unity. Romantic Irony raised the poet to the position of a divine creator who can simultaneously create and de-create as well as love and deride his work, and who alone sees the ultimate unity of its disjointed parts. Love and poetry, rooted deep in the divine nature of every man, would effect this reunification of contrary elements: Ihr möget nun lächeln über dieses mystische Gedicht und über die Unordnung, die etwa aus dem Gedränge und der Fülle von Dichtungen entstehen dürfte. Aber die höchste Schönheit, ja die höchste Ordnung ist denn doch nur das Chaos, nämlich eines solchen, welches nur auf die Berührung der Liebe wartet, um sich zu einer harmonischen Welt zu entfalten, eines solchen, wie es auch die alte Mythologie und Poesie war. Denn Mythologie und Poesie, beide sind eins und unzertrennlich. […] alles greift ineinander, und überall ist ein und derselbe Geist nur anders ausgedrückt. […]199 Da finde ich nun eine große Ähnlichkeit mit jenem großen Witz der romantischen Poesie, der nicht in einzelnen Einfällen, sondern in der Konstruktion des Ganzen sich zeigt […] Ja, diese künstlich geordnete Verwirrung, diese reizende Symmetrie von Widersprüchen, dieser wunderbare Wechsel von von Enthusiasmus und Ironie, der selbst in den kleinsten Gliedern des ganzen lebt, scheinen mir schon selbst eine indirekte Mythologie zu sein. Die Organisation ist dieselbe, und gewiß ist die Arabaske die älteste und ursprüngliche Form der menschlichen Fantasie.200

Friedrich Schlegel’s attempt at reconciling Platonic and Pyrrhonian Romanticism was informed by an ultimate faith in a world aim and order, in the interest of the former. The world, its myths and poetries, and the arabesque had that in common: their fragmentation and bewildering chaos could be reduced to an 198 Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Fragmente, Nr 42, I. 171. 199 Friedrich Schlegel, Gespräch über die Poesie, Rede über die Mythologie, 1800, II. 160. Hierzu K.K. Polheim, Die Arabeske. Ansichten und Ideen aus Friedrich Schlegels Poetik. Munich, Paderborn, and Vienna 1966. 200 Ibid. II. 64.

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original overarching unity by the vision of the artist, a poetological and mythopoetical concept akin to Blake and Shelley. Romantic Irony enabled man to endure the horrors of reality that he experienced daily and avoid the abyss of disillusion and subsequent despair with humorous detachment on the basis of a Romantic universal religiousness. Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–1767) and Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste (MS 1773–1775), which Schlegel mentions as instances of irony and arabesque201 as well as Ludwig Tieck’s Der gestiefelte Kater (1797) and Clemens Brentano’s Godwi (1801), destroyed the regular Neoclassical forms and rules in order to create an enjoyably grotesque aesthetic chaos. Illusions are built up and demolished, though, in Brentano’s case without Byron’s, Poe’s, Heine’s, or Büchner’s equation of illusion and religion, without their existentialist doubt about an ultimate world aim and order. Tieck, who alternately represented both sides of Romanticism in a kind of Romantic Irony, met the Schlegel brothers in Jena, moved with Friedrich Schlegel to Dresden, and turned Friedrich’s theories into literary practice. His comedy Der gestiefelte Kater, however, exposes the failure of such Platonic-Romantic attempts at overcoming the world’s fragmentation diagnosed by all Romantics. It is an illusionist play within a disillusioning play about primitivist fairy tales for children heard by adults in a past-Enlightenment adult age. It follows the tradition of dramatic parabasis that Schlegel associated with Romantic Irony, a permanent Aus-der-Rolle-Fallen.202 Its disillusionism is, at first sight, centred in aesthetics, but raises existentialist questions about a hidden Platonic world aim and order. The taste of the spectators is shaped by a popular kind of Enlightenment doubt of magic and metaphysics, which will not allow a dramatized version of a Romantic Kunstmärchen on the stage. Fischer, Leuthner, and the critics object to the play’s “irrational illusion”: Ohne Musik, Freund, ist dergleichen abgeschmackt, denn ich versichre Sie, Liebster, Bester, nur durch diese himmlische Kunst bringen wir alle die Dummheiten hinunter. Ei was, genau genommen sind wir über Fratzen und Aberglauben weg; die Aufklärung hat ihre Früchte getragen, wie sich’s gehört.203

In excess of both Brentano’s Romantic Irony and his own satire on his archenemy Karl August Böttiger’s Enlightenment anti-Romanticism,204 Tieck’s play is sceptical regarding the realization of a Positive Romantic programme, including a transcendental view of a world order and world aim.205 He brings ever201 Friedrich Schlegel, Gespräch über die Poesie, Brief über den Roman, 1800, II. 173. 202 Frederick Burwick, Illusion and the Drama, University Park PA 1991, 292. 203 Tieck, Der gestiefelte Kater, Prolog, 1797, in: Werke in zwei Bänden, ed. Klaus Friedrich Köpp, Bibliothek deutscher Klassiker, Berlin 1985, I. 4. 204 Roger Paulin, Ludwig Tieck: A Literary Biography, Oxford 1985, 64–65. 205 Gerhard Kaiser, Literarische Romantik, 42.

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new nonsense into the work. Thus Leuthner answers Fischer’s question concerning the sense of a new scene in a way that suggests that both the play and the world are a heap of ever-new nonsense added to more nonsense, without a firm centre or aim: Zu gar nichts, sie ist völlig überflüssig; bloß um einen neuen Unsinn hineinzubringen. Den Kater verliert man ganz aus den Augen und behält nirgend einen festen Standpunkt.206

In the Classical Tradition, Romantic Irony was Socratic in its avoidance of Platonic dogmatic rigidity, but not necessarily subversive in the line of Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus. Originally it was a concept of affirmative Positive Romanticism but paved the way for Romantic Scepticism, though it could stop short of negation and affirm faith without dogmatic petrification. It has recently been pointed out that the bewildering contradictions of Thomas Carlyle’s late Romantic serio-comic Sartor Resartus (1833–1834), featuring a rigidly yet comically dogmatic Diogenes Teufelsdröckh and his sceptical Editor, exposes the Romantic Irony that Carlyle must have known – theoretically from Friedrich Schlegel and practically from the ventriloquism of his friend and antagonist Francis Jeffrey of the Whig Edinburgh Review.207 It sets out as a Byronic narrative, only to end by repudiating Byronism.208 It is a pre-Victorian dogmatic work affirming faith and commitment, attenuated by self-critical humour, without giving up its basic philosophical and ethical position. In its aesthetic playfulness and urbane detachment, Friedrich Schlegel’s saving concept of Romantic Irony did not stand the test of time. Sooner or later authors had to make up their minds whether to become believers or sceptics. In Die romantische Schule and Der Tannhäuser (both 1836), Heine sorted Tieck with Friedrich Schlegel for desertion to conservative faith, calling him a changeling and an old dog without a bite, whereas he had formerly held him in high esteem for his scepticism and poetic qualities, including his mixture of earnestness and chaotic farce. Bakhtinian carnivalistic enjoyment of chaos is temporary, cognizant of the fact that the higgledy-piggledy, disjunct, and grotesque world will soon return to its natural order. Carnivalistic comic relief – as in the works of Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, and Sterne – provides that relief only on the basis on a firm faith in a logically created and purposeful world. In Tieck’s early fiction and drama, however, it flares up as occasional existential doubt. And in Musset’s novel La confession d’un enfant du siHcle (1836) it becomes permanent, the true condition of man – the truth hidden underneath the orderly 206 Tieck, Der gestiefelte Kater, ed. cit. I. 24. 207 William Christie, The Edinburgh Review in the Literary Culture of Romantic Britain, London 2009, 167–185. 208 Andrew Elfenbein, Byron and the Victorians, Cambridge 1995, 221–229.

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surface – and Ash Wednesday can no longer restore order. Instead, we have isolation, aggression, dirt, prostitution, debauchery, and danse macabre. “[…] la v8rit8, c’est la nudit8, […] le corps 8tait sous l’habit, le squelette 8tait sous le corps”.209 The breaking down or “sectionalization” of the original Romantic Irony into its two constituents – belief and doubt – has been interpreted as a symptom of the “Biedermeier taming of Romanticism”.210 The generation of Wordsworths, Coleridges, Southeys, Scotts, Brentanos, Görreses, and Beethovens chose a return to established religion and political conservatism as advocated in the novels of Jane Austen, with her heroines and heroes who find their way from sensibility to sense: The generation of Novalis, Hölderlin, Tieck, and the Schlegels corresponds to Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge in time as well as in ideas and style. Tieck and Friedrich Schlegel changed after 1815 much like Wordsworth and Coleridge.211

According to Virgil Nemoianu, this was a related symptom of Biedermeier, mirrored in the post-1814 reduction of the heroes of the historical novel to reality from romance, and to local restriction and microhappiness from dreams of infinity and happiness, as with Scott’s Waverley or Adalbert Stifter’s Witiko.212 Friedrich Schlegel thus became a dogmatically fixed Roman Catholic – and a target for Heinrich Heine’s satire – from the same motives that made Hegel’s disciple Søren Kierkegaard a conservative believer on the basis of credo quia absurdum, his acceptance of man’s angst-ridden loneliness before an equally lonely God notwithstanding. At no time during his career was Friedrich Schlegel a Romantic Disillusionist, though he attested to the existence and increasing strength of Romantic Disillusionism by arguing and fighting against it all his life in his writings as well as in his biography.213 He thought that his brother August Wilhelm Schlegel’s distinction between the Classical and the Romantic could be overcome, like the distinction between spiritual and physical love, and that the hybridization of genres made the novel the most Romantic of all genres. His Platonism also interpreted the chaos of dreams as an earthly fragmentation of an

209 Alfred de Musset, La confession d’un enfant du siHcle, 1836, part 2, chapter 4, in: Musset, Confession d’un enfant du siHcle, 1836, part 1, chapter 5, in: Œuvres complHtes en prose, ed. Maurice Allem – Paul-Courant, BibliothHque de la Pl8iade, Paris 1960, 133–134. 210 Virgil Nemoianu, The Taming of Romanticism, 161–193. 211 Ibid. 75. 212 Ibid. 194–232. 213 This is to contest the usefulness of the broad definition of Romantic Irony by Mellor, who does not distinguish between ironic playfulness and existentialist doubt; Mellor, English Romantic Irony, Cambridge MA 1980.

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ultimate unity, “unendliche Fülle” subsumed in “unendlicher Einheit”.214 In his unfinished Shandyesque novel Lucinde (1799) he inserted an allegorical poetological dream with a chaotic dispute of four types of the novel, bringing together such contradictory properties of literature as decorum, insolence, wit, delicacy, and boldness under a strict formal order – with the ultimate aim to overcome the divide between Neoclassicism and Romanticism as well as the clash of tradition and revolution.215 But, ultimately, his attempts to reconcile contradictions proved a failure, like his novel. In a storm of censure and satires, Friedrich Schleiermacher was the only critic to understand and support it. Romantic Disillusionism ultimately overcame Romantic Platonism, just as the Mesmer-Freudian concept of heterogeneous, instinct-driven man’s dreams revealed that chaos ultimately overcame the Christian concept of homogeneous, divinely-constituted man’s metaphysical foundation. Socrates, whom Friedrich Schlegel cites as an early example of the simultaneous existence of creation and de-creation, belief and doubt, reappears in the epigraph of Caroline Lamb’s Gothic oriental novel Ada Reis (1823), a feminine counter-text to Byron’s Corsair modelled on Beckford’s Vathek (1786). It replaced the aristocratic, cosmic rebel of the Beckford-Byron type with a mean, rags-to-riches merchant yet retains such heroes’ lack of autonomy, their slavery to passion.216 Lamb, who taught herself Greek and Latin, quoted Xenophon’s memoirs of his teacher Socrates, who, as we have seen, was reported to have taken everything that he said half in earnest and half in jest, always distancing himself from himself.217 The Greek quotation (“toiaOta l³m peq· to¼tym ]paifem ûla spoud\fym”) corresponds to the Latin quotation in her second epigraph – that the ear should neither reject nor easily believe (“Nil spernat auris, nec tamen credit statim”). Like the Gothic novels of Walpole and Beckford, Caroline Lamb’s own is open to both serious and self-parodic reading. Analogously, the moral of the novel as declared in the introduction218 and conclusion219 is belied by the novel itself in its bewildering and contingent plot. The characters must act as they act, following contending forces, and repentance is nothing but the temporary prevalence of Zevahir, the power of light, over Kabkarra, the power of darkness. In the final scene in hell – both a Dantesque vision of horror and a Menippean satire following in the wake of Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead – the 214 Friedrich Schlegel, Lucinde, 1799, ed. Karl Konrad Polheim, Reclams Universal Bibliothek, Stuttgart: Reclam 1999, 202–203. 215 Ibid. 23–30. 216 Caroline Franklin, The Female Romantics, 63–70. 217 Xenophon, Memorabilia, I. III. 8, Loeb Classical Library, London and Cambridge MA 1923, 1959, 48. 218 Caroline Lamb, Ada Reis, London 1823, I. VII–XXIV. 219 Ibid. III. 142–144.

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disillusioning truth behind the doctrines of religion is revealed. All the sinners, victims of their passions, are granted probation because they argue that they neither knew the nature of their sin nor its cruel punishment for eternity. But, as in Byron, neither the knowledge of evil nor the knowledge of subsequent punishment could prevent them from committing their sins again. Much the same applies to Plantagenet Cadurcis and Marmion Herbert, the protagonists of Benjamin Disraeli’s early Byronic novel Venetia (1837); to Rolla, the eponymous protagonist of Alfred de Musset’s Byronic verse tale (1833); and to Octave, the protagonist of Musset’s Byronic novel La confession d’un enfant du siHcle (1836). With the exception of the penitent Fiormonda all of Lamb’s novel’s characters relapse, preferring the intense pleasure of the moment to the more intense displeasure of eternal damnation. That punishment and insight lead to the improvement of man and society- the doctrine of state and church – is both doubted in its general validity and satirized in the novel’s ironical moral claim. The whole narrative is thus an instance of Romantic Irony as it mocks the seriousness of its own pious didactic mission based on Dante’s pious old epic: Look then, into your own heart; repent, and pray ; beware of the fate of Ada Reis; for, however seductive the paths of pleasure, however delightful the palace, the banquets, and the song of the tempter, remember that, step by step, they lead to the gate of the burning vault, over which it is written – ‘Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’ intrate.’220

Romantic Irony and the arabesque were, paradoxically, destined to contribute to rather than counteract the formation of Romantic Disillusionism, and have been revived in Postmodern Neopragmatism as indispensable for a postmetaphysical and anti-foundationalist culture in a godless world.221 Byron’s self-reflexivity in Don Juan is subversive rather than confirmative of belief – a constant probing of the truth to all doctrines of religion, philosophy, and art. Systems and beliefs are built up, only to be bathetically demolished by ridicule. Analogously, obscure plots remain unravelled with alternative possibilities of the “truth” remaining suspended and undecided. In the English cantos of Don Juan, for instance, the reader is left in doubt as to major elements of the plot: the motives and marital fidelity of Lady Adeline Amundeville, the motives and feelings of Don Juan and Aurora Raby, the nature of the first appearance of the ghost, the existence of ghosts in general, and the nature of Juan’s second encounter with the Duchess of Fitz-Fulke disguised as ghost. “I leave the thing a problem, like all things”.222 In the tales of Byron’s admirer Edgar Allan Poe, too, conventions of the Gothic novel are subtly parodied and turned to literary hoaxes, and serious horror is 220 Ibid. III. 144. Quoting the inscription above Dante’s Inferno. 221 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, New York NY 1989. 222 Byron, Don Juan, 17. 13. 1.

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cumulatively undercut by ridiculous plots, exaggerated stereotypes, confused dialogues, and bathetic lapses in style.223 The horror of “The Loss of Breath” and “Metzengerstein” (both 1832), with their stock Gothic repertoire of cruelty, burial vaults, improbabilities, prophecies and ghastly revenants, is exaggerated to self-parody and ridicule, much as Poe’s chief model, Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1765), and Kleist’s short tale “Das Bettelweib von Locarno” (1810), can be read as self-parodic, creating and de-creating terror and horror from the first work of the Romantic genre. Later in England, John Bell published Matthew Gregory Lewis’s Tales of Wonder (1800) with a twin volume, uniform in size, containing a parody of his work, Tales of Terror (1801), often – though falsely – attributed to Lewis himself as a self-parody. The public was aware of the thin line separating the terrific from the ridiculous. The reader’s doubt as to the seriousness of Poe’s unreliable narrators increases with their tales’ affirmations, especially with regard to the truth of metempsychosis and mesmerism. On the model of “The Balloon Hoax” (1844), with its jocularly imposition of a new discovery (air as well as earth and water serving as a common highway for mankind) and diverging from visionary Positive Romanticism, disbelief is not temporarily suspended as in Coleridge, but is ultimately increased. Poe’s reader cannot grasp reality any more than Poe’s confused narrators can, despite whatever efforts they make. Poe’s “grotesque and arabesque” stands for ultimate disorientation rather than a temporary carnival. The whole universe appears as a gigantic hoax that God has played on man.224 Due to the reprint trade, Byron’s popularity in America was immense and remained so long after his death, with his mordant critique of Britain outweighing that of dogmatic religion and traditional morality.225 Byron’s and Poe’s works, though different in style and genre, are the culmination of Romantic Pyrrhonism and schwarze Romantik that had been the reverse side of Romanticism from the outset, negotiating Platonic belief with Pyrrhonian doubt. Romantic Disillusionism is to Positive Romanticism what the dark side of the tortoise is to its light side in Melville’s tale “The Encantadas” (1856), or the 23rd Psalm’s Valley of the Shadow of Death challenging the utopia of the American Transcendentalists in Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance (1852), making itself felt in the world via inescapable evil, disease, and death. Some Romantic authors had been able to write simultaneously affirmative and disillusionist works, alternating and negotiating visionary expectations with realistic doubts. William 223 G.R. Thompson, Poe’s Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales, Madison WI 1973, 53. 224 Ibid. chapter 7 Romantic Skepticism, 165–195. 225 Peter X. Accardo, Byron in America, Harvard Library Bulletin, Cambridge MA 1998, vol. 9, no. 2, 5–60.

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Wordsworth’s “The Idiot Boy” (Lyrical Ballads 1798) celebrates trust in nature over and against trust in active plans in contrasting a group of two simple yet wise creatures (the idiot boy and his pony) to a group of adult yet unwise activists (the boy’s mother and her old patient). Such na"ve, boyish trust in nature, however, does not support the reproach of Romantic escapism. It was rather meant as a corrective, a counter design to the feverish acceleration and increasing anxieties of life in the age of the Industrial Revolution, a plea for deceleration and equanimity. As such, it anticipated Joseph von Eichendorff ’s popular novella Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts (1826), featuring a young hero who succeeds in everything although – or because – he trusts in nature and spurns all rational, adult planning. Yet the later Romantic Eichendorff, usually read as a Positive Romantic throughout, may well have expressed his doubt, ending his tale on a sceptical note of Romantic Irony ; after the inconsiderate hero’s most improbably fortunate, unrealistic adventures it is difficult to believe that everything in this world must finally come to a good end: “Und es war alles, alles gut”.226 The same applies to the Orientalist Romantic poet Friedrich Rückert, whose poetry of religion, love, and death was alternately pious and sceptical, depending on his mood and experience with the seasons of spring and autumn, and inspired by the holy books of Hinduism, Christianity and Islam as well as by the tragic experience of the loss of his children. Keats’s sonnet “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again” (1818) was one of many poetical expressions of his ever-present distrust of “golden-tongued Romance”, apart from the disillusioned endings to his new Romantic romances.227 And parodists and critics of Romanticism, John Wilson and David Macbeth Moir, Neoclassical advocates of the Classical Tradition and Tory contributors to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, could also contribute Romantic poems in various strains: graveyard poetry in the style of Young and Blair, landscape poetry in the style of Wordsworth, and elegiacally disillusionist poetry in the style of Byron. Romanticism had many sides, and Byron, with his opposition of “variety” to “cant”, was not the only Proteus of his age. For instance Moir’s “Moods of the Minds” series, published in four instalments of three poems each in Blackwood’s (1820), included “The Isle of Despair : A Vision”, which elaborated the symbolism of a bleak and waste solitary landscape of the soul made drearier by hollow cries, the weltering sea, and animal cannibalism in situations of famine, very much akin to Byron’s disillusionist poem “Darkness” (MS 1816) written in the “year without summer”:228 226 Eichendorff, Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts, in: Ausgewählte Werke, ed. Paul Stapf, Tempel-Klassiker, Berlin and Darmstadt, 1955, 816. 227 Jack Stillinger, The Hoodwinking of Madeline, Urbana 1971, passim. 228 Mirka Horova, Byron and Catastrophism, in Peter Cochran (ed.), Byron’s Religions, Newcastle-upon-Tyne 2011, 253–261.

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A solitary waste – a waste of snows – Bleak rocks and frozen waters – desolate, Beyond the painter’s touch, or poet’s thought.229

What has been aptly identified as the “Romantic paradox” in the simultaneity of a decreasing sentimentalism and increasing realism in Romantic representations of violence, especially in romances, is only part of a wider phenomenon: the parallel yet divergent trajectories of Positive and Negative Romanticism.230 In earlier, less disillusioned decades when authors and readers could still escape reality in the charms of golden-tongued romance, Klingemann’s and Senancour’s Pyrrhonian novels (both dated 1804) had still been unsuccessful. But they proved to be breaking ground for the future, and confirmed Friedrich Schlegel’s fears about an increasing Romantic despair. Both authors found their admirers later, long after the Battle of Waterloo and the Congress of Vienna, when doubt eventually overcame hope. The various expressions of scepticism in Tieck, Klingemann, Senancour, Byron, Clare, Musset, Leopardi, Poe, or Melville concerning Paradise Regained, resurrection and regeneration, tended towards (and with some authors actually resulted in) a firm doctrinal creed of disbelief.231 Nihilism would become the fundamentalist philosophical position of a final and irreversible insight into the absurd circles of human life and history, a negative synthesis assuming a life without meaning, purpose, or value. It found expression in the dramatic works of Grabbe, who, in his Don Juan und Faust (1829), discredited Goethe’s drama by presenting an unredeemed Faust, a hero both tragic and comic, and a grotesque exponent of the failure of German Idealist philosophy. It found its culmination in Arthur Schopenhauer’s anti-Platonic and anti-Kantian voluntaristic philosophy where the world is understood as man’s representation, a construction of his ordering intellect impelled by the real yet unfathomable thing-in–itself, our metaphysically grounded, self-perpetuating, futile, and illogical Will to live – “Wille [zum Leben] und Vorstellung”. Thus, Schopenhauer turned Fichte’s positive German Idealism, much admired by Coleridge, which claimed the primacy of the autonomous “posited ego” and its shaping of the world, into a negative one. Schopenhauer, who thought it a shame that Thorwaldsen’s bust of Byron was not placed next to the “mediocre” statue of Wordsworth in Westminster Abbey, fitted Byron’s empiricist scepticism into his 229 Moir, The Isle of Despair, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 7 (1820), 45–47. Also see the commentary in Nicholas Mason et al. (eds.), Blackwood’s Magazine, 1817–1825: Selections from the Maga’s Infancy, Pickering Masters, London 2006, I. 141. 230 Labbe, The Romantic Paradox, passim. 231 This is to contradict the view of Byron as a nihilist, as advanced by Jürgen Klein, Schwarze Romantik, 175–276. Byron was a Pyrrhonist sceptical of all belief and knowledge, including nihilism, and not a believing, dogmatic nihilist. Declared nihilism in Byron is doubting provocation of orthodoxy rather than dogma.

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own doctrinal creed.232 An independent reason is simply human self-deception because it is a slave to the Will, and perception becomes creation, both of matter and sense: “Denn die Natur ist nur das Abbild, der Schatten unsers Willens”.233 The Will to live, as opposed to reason’s false implication of man’s autonomy regarding his impulse-controlling individual will, becomes the thing-in–itself, which generates mere appearances of individuation. The beauty of art is no longer a terrestrial projection of truth and justice, but a mere momentary relief from the Will to live, which produces human suffering. The perversion, as well as that of the whole of Positive Romanticism’s Idealist philosophy including Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, is here accomplished. Eduard von Hartmann, who sought a compromise between Hegel’s optimism and Schopenhauer’s pessimism, followed Byron insofar as he saw the reason incapable of controlling the will, at least in the contemporary phase of the evolution of human civilization. In his philosophy, the balance of happiness and misery has always been negative, and the progress of civilization will tip it further towards the negative. It is only by a gradual overcoming of the will to achieve happiness that man can, sometime in the distant future, make his reason dominate his will, without, however, regaining the pre-existential balance of happiness and misery. Romantic Disillusionism taught Hartmann that progressing sensibility and insight into the illusions of life would rather add to the negative balance: Zu diesem Antagonismus des Kulturfortschrittes und der Glückseligkeit kommen aber noch die beiden inneren Gründe für das zunehmende Wachstum des Unlustüberschusses, nämlich die zunehmende Bedürftigkeit und Empfänglichkeit des Gefühls und die zunehmende Durchschauung der Illusionen des Lebens. Der Naturzustand ist der relativ glücklichste […]234

Although Hartmann’s philosophy of the progress of human civilization contains moderate elements of Hegelian optimism, his Fin-de-SiHcle readers generally understood him in line with Schopenhauer’s pessimism and nihilism. They disparaged both philosophers as advocating suicide, which was obviously not the case but could be a conclusion to be drawn. Both philosophers instead taught to bear the burdens of life. Stoic nihilism combined with positions of Romantic Disillusionism would find further culmination in Friedrich Nietzsche, the severest critic of Hartmann’s linear view of history and scientific rationalism. Nietzsche’s return to Byron’s and Romantic Disillusionism’s circular view of history, his desertion of 232 Gerhart Hoffmeister, Byron und der europäische Byronismus, 139–141. 233 Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Leipzig 1819–1844, ed. Rolf Toman, 4 vols., Cologne 1997, II. 803. 234 Hartmann, Zur Geschichte und Begründung des Pessimismus, Berlin 1880, 76–77.

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the prevalent nineteenth-century melioristic view of linearity in his philosophy of “die ewige Wiederkehr des Gleichen” contradicted Hegel and Hartmann in a memorable formulation: Denken wir diesen Gedanken in seiner furchtbarsten Form: das Dasein, so wie es ist, ohne Sinn und Ziel, aber unvermeidlich wiederkehrend, ohne ein Finale ins Nichts: ‘die ewige Wiederkehr’. Das ist die extremste Form des Nihilismus: das Nichts (das ‘Sinnlose’) ewig!235

Art, which Nietzsche understood as the last bastion of religion in a world without God, served the positive function of supporting man’s will to survive in spite of his awareness of and insight into life’s vanity.236 What mainly distinguished the avid Byron readers Nietzsche and Miguel de Unamuno from Byron was their overcoming of Byronic scepticism in an affirmative acceptance of the tragic condition of mortal man – Nietzsche in nihilism and Unamuno in a semiheretical and anti-dogmatic version of Roman Catholicism.237 Before such consummate nihilism as Nietzsche’s, however, it was the hallmark and literary self-fashioning of Romantic Disillusionism to claim no final insights and ultimate conclusions, but rather to always change positions and moods, remaining disorientated in an aimless world. Mary Robinson’s lyrical pieces are typical of this lack of certainty, treating such popular subjects as evening, light, twilight, nature, solitude, wandering, and rapture under alternately positive and negative aspects, leaving the reader perplexed. Her sonnet on twilight, for instance, written in a free Surrey-Shakespeare form to demonstrate her Whiggish Preromantic rebellion against aesthetic as well as political rules, sets out like a pious hymn to the liminal Goddess Twilight with her “placid hour and “fragrant breath”.238 But negative associations soon creep in as the positive ones fade out with the light and colours of the soothingly sublime scenery. Lengthening western shades carry associations of death, a cold Vestal and a sandy waste suggest sterility and do not encourage faith in resurrection, and a solitary traveller is bewildered, lonely, and disorientated instead of feeling communion with the universe, contrary to Wordsworth’s Solitary. The sonnet ends on a Negative Romantic note, evoking the dark tragedy of “Philomel forlorn”, as if the Twilight of the Gods would not keep its mythical promise of a rejuvenated universe: 235 Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, MSS 1886–1887, in: Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. G. Colli – M. Montinari, Berlin 1967- , VIII. I. 217. 236 Karlheinz Barck et al. (eds.), Ästhetische Grundbegriffe (AGB): Historisches Wörterbuch in sieben Bänden, Stuttgart 2010, I. 381–383. 237 Unamuno, Del sentimento tr#gico de la vida en los hombres y en los pueblos (1913). 238 Robinson, Twilight, in: Morning Post 20 April 1798, lines 1–2, in: Selected Poems, ed. Judith Pascoe, Peterborough Ont. 2000, 20.

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[…] The purpling hue From the dark woody height now disappears; While nothing seems to breathe, save where the song Of Philomel forlorn trills her dark haunts among.239

Like Robinson’s “wilder’d traveller”, Lermontov’s Pechorin is also an aimless wanderer and sceptic whose adventures are segmented, in perversion of a bildungsroman process of learning, and whose final position is to doubt everything and believe nothing. He is a Baudelairean fl.neur who has neither permanent residence nor permanent faith, neither permanent love nor permanent satisfaction. Every new acquisition soon bores him, including his beautiful young love Bela, whose death he causes after robbing her from her father, making him wander on. The question whether his Byronic spoiler’s fate is the result of mere chance or cruel predestination remains unanswered with the novel’s open ending.240 This ultimate doubt also finds memorable expression in Thomas Hardy’s poems, which sometimes feature an indifferent, sometimes bungling, sometimes malevolent God, allowing for the possibility that God is merely a creature of man’s wishful thinking. In “God’s Funeral” (MS 1909–10), for instance, the poem’s sceptical speaker has a dream vision of a funeral procession – the opposite of medieval dream visions of divine glory. A depressed crowd of modern men, women, and children carry to his grave the God whom their Christian ancestors had themselves created and firmly believed in for their own consolation. But, in the course of time, the old saving illusion has been giving way to disillusionism, under the impact of “Uncompromising rude reality”.241 Their dilemma is that they can neither recapture their old belief nor bury it in favour of a new one; a modern, Nietzschean religion of agnosticism or even atheism. Their doubt overshadows a funeral procession. The people that walk in darkness see (or want to see) a promising light – a faint glimmer rather than the great light promised by the prophet Isaiah. The funeral procession marches on with its corpse in the faint hope of resurrection, and the speaker follows it in spite of his sceptical philosophy : Still, how to bear such loss I deemed The insistent question for each animate mind, And gazing, to my growing sight there seemed A pale yet positive gleam low down behind, Whereof, to lift the general night, A certain few who stood aloof had said, 239 Ibid. lines 11–14, ed. cit. 21. 240 Lermontov, 4Va_Z ^QiVT_ SaV]V^Y, 1840, transl. cit. 148–157. 241 Hardy, God’s Funeral, line 34, in: Complete Poems, ed. James Gibson, The New Wessex Edition, London 1976, 327.

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‘See you upon the horizon that small light – Swelling somewhat?’ Each mourner shook his head. And they composed a crowd of whom Some were right good, and many nigh the best. … Thus dazed and puzzled ’twixt the gleam and gloom Mechanically I followed with the rest.242

Such doubt, such tantalizing wavering between negation and vain hope, explains why Byron and Heine could insert occasional optimistic passages into their work, only to discredit them with the next poem, letter, or essay. It also explains the curious fact that Wilhelm Müller, although a Negative Romantic in his two collections of Gedichte aus den hinterlassenen Papieren eines reisenden Waldhornisten (1821 and 1824), still acted as a Positive Romantic in his Philhellenism, earning him the nickname of Griechen-Müller. In his Griechenlieder (1821– 1826), as well as in his poems on the death of Byron (1824) and the fall of Missolonghi (1826),243 Müller expressed an enthusiastic Shelleyan belief in the improvement of the world through the victory of liberalism in the War of Greek Independence; and he successfully opposed Goethe’s clear-sighted doubting of Byron’s heroic death in battle, thus helping to establish the Greek Byron myth in Germany. Müller’s speakers are many, changing their attitude from poem to poem, either hopefully certain or hopelessly despairing of gaining final peace both here and hereafter. Even the final nihilism of Romantic Disillusionism could be a sceptical and changeable one. Thomas Hardy’s growing gloom and despair of the future is thus occasionally relieved in such poems as “The Darkling Thrush” (MS 31 December 1900). In the cold, dull winter of 1822–1823, Byron wrote two works which are similarly contrary and heterogeneous in position and mood, yet, as will be shown later, concur in falling back into a hopeless outlook: “The Age of Bronze was an attempt to deal in a Juvenalian manner with the decadence of the postNapoleonic world, while The Island, based on accounts of the mutiny on the Bounty, was a vicarious escape to the South Seas and a world of noble savages”.244 However, the British Captain Bligh and the feudal and military order for which he stands are the real victors of Byron’s verse tale, not his doomed Byronic hero Christian or his noble savages Torquil and Neuha. The restoration quenches the revolution; all the rest is a vain dream. Another characteristic that The Age of Bronze and The Island share is their typically Byronic mixture of Romantic complaint and Neoclassical satire, de242 Ibid. stanzas 15–7, ed. cit. 328–329. 243 Wilhelm Müller, Gedichte, ed. J.T. Hatfield, Berlin 1906, 181–234. 244 Marchand, Byron: A Portrait, 395.

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noting man’s repeated lapses from illusion into reality – from dreaming to waking, from romance to novel, and from imagination to common sense. Neoclassical satire worked on the assumption of rational man’s cultural education in a reformable world; vices and follies were measured against a standard of reason and exposed to ridicule with educational “satirical lashes”. Augustan satire hence had no place in Positive Romanticism’s cult of sentiment, at least not in theory.245 In both Romantic Disillusionism and Modernism, however, satire regained its ground, though on another assumption: where man and the world were not to be improved, formal satire gave shape to chaos, causing emotional distance and making it bearable in forms of art.246 Art began to take the place formerly assigned to religion. This explains the frequency of satire in Byron’s and his successors’ works. Byron’s The Age of Bronze, or, Carmen Seculare et Annus Haud Mirabilis, betrays its satirical irony in both its title and its rational didactic heroic couplets, which alternately – in long passages – lament the vain dreams of this amoral world. Both Alexander and Napoleon ended their conquests in an unknown grave, indifferently alike with the just and the unjust. “All is exploded – be it good or bad”.247 Pyrrhonism and historical pessimism join in an attitude of resignation both mordant and plaintive: I know not if the angels weep, but men Have wept enough – for what? – to weep again!248

Men, aware of the imperfection and suffering of this world, dream of a perfect, peaceful, unchanging, equal, free, fraternal, lawless, and painless world; a paradise lost in the past to be regained in the future. This universal dream might either be interpreted as the soul’s reminiscence of the world beyond (Blake) or its engaging in wishful thinking (Byron). In allusion to the Classical Tradition, Byron’s “age of bronze” shows the world’s real condition after its wishfully imagined age of gold. Here, the reality of the myth of Paradise is Paradise Lost, without Paradise Regained. Tieck’s novella “Der blonde Eckbert” (1797) perverts the dialectical trias in its three versions of the bird song on Waldeinsamkeit, beginning with an illusory Paradise of universal unity, proceeding to Paradise Lost with Bertha’s narration of her cruel childhood and murder of the bird, ending in ironic praise of Paradise Regained with the revelation of the involuntary homicide, Eckbert’s incestuous marriage, and his final death in madness. Here, woodland isolation no longer stands for the reintegration of man into nature and the divine as in Tieck’s artist novel Franz Sternbald’s Wande245 Steven E. Jones, Satire and Romanticism, New York 2000. 246 As, later, in the trench poetry of the First World War and in the novels of H.G. Wells and Osbert Sitwell. 247 Byron, The Age of Bronze, line 9, in: Complete Poetical Works, ed. cit. VII. 1. 248 Ibid. lines 7–8.

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rungen (1798), the philosophy of the Jena Romantic Friedrich Schleiermacher, and the poetry of the Heidelberg Romantic Joseph von Eichendorff; on the contrary, they relapse into negative symbols of disorientation, danger, devilry, and death. As later in Edgar Allan Poe’s stories, the reader is as confused as the hero about what is real and what is imagined in madness. In both cases the novellas end in a debased form of Paradise Lost instead of an upgraded Paradise Regained: ultimate madness and chaos. Poesque mania, opposed to Platonism, here denotes final disintegration rather than higher insight. In the sceptical cosmology of Poe, the original unity is not only split up but progressively atomized into nothingness, beyond any certainty of a later recovery and reintegration both in the universe and in the individual. Whereas Positive Romantic interest was focussed on the first phase of life, namely the transition from the world beyond into early infancy and anamnesis – as in Wordsworth’s Intimations Ode (MS 1804) – the Negative and Decadent Romantic interest became fixed on the last phase of life: decay, disintegration, dementia, and death, doubting a transition to a better world beyond. In 1810, one year before his death at a young age by suicide, Kleist wrote his fictional dialogue “Über das Marionettentheater”, which was possibly inspired by Denis Diderot’s fictional dialogue “Paradoxe sur le com8dien” (MS 1778). Its polemical argumentation and illustrative tales target both Weimar Classicism and Positive Romanticism. The work shows that the marionette has more grace and naturalness than the dancer because its movements under gravitation are neither studied nor regular. The Fall of man in biblical myth arose from his eating not only from the Tree of Life, but also from the Tree of Knowledge, thereby losing his unreflected grace and innocence. Positive Romanticism’s claim to natural spontaneity is spurious because, like Weimar Classicism, it cultivates a studied grace but, in reality, creates mere automata: ars est celare artem. Basically, it was the same reproach of forgery that the Neoclassicists of the Romantic Period advanced against Romantic poetics.249 As in the tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann and the poetological treatises of Edgar Allan Poe that deconstruct the Positive Romantic myth of the soul creating art, especially in Hoffmann’s tale of the dancing automaton Olimpia, the soul is nothing but a human artefact with a deceptive but ironical name suggesting Olympic origin.250 Only a return to paradise, Kleist says, could recover true, natural, unstudied grace. But hope for

249 Rolf Lessenich, Neoclassical Satire and the Romantic School, 355–376. 250 Helmut J. Schneider, Zur Virtuosität des poetischen Werks in der klassisch-romantischen Epoche, in: Genie – Virtuose – Dilettant: Konfigurationen romantischer Schöpfungsästhetik, Würzburg 2011, 45–66. For Poe’s knowledge of German and German literature see Palmer Cobb, The Influence of E.T.A. Hoffmann on the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Chapel Hill NC 1908, passim.

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such a return in this life is vain, “das ist das letzte Kapitel von der Geschichte der Welt”.251 What Romantic Disillusionism claimed to be true for dreams of universal or historical bliss also applied to equivalent personal dreams. Awakening to bleak reality from vain dreams of a future paradise never to come, or of vain memories of past joys forever lost, and finding oneself all the more depressed for having dreamed was a commonplace of Romantic Disillusionism. Dialectical synthesis, with its upward evolution, is replaced by an absurd circle. Byron’s early poem “I Would I Were a Careless Child” has a speaker young in years but old in experiences of disillusion, who laments having dreamed at all: Once I beheld a splendid dream, A visionary scene of bliss; Truth! – wherefore did thy hated beam Awake me to a world like this?252

Clare echoed the never-ending ups and downs in Byron’s poetry, with every illusion being followed by a new fall into disillusionment, then by new illusory hope replacing the Wordsworthian synthesis of “despondency corrected” in a viciously absurd circle. In a short poem written in the confinement of a mental asylum and entitled “Ballad”, Clare’s speaker complains of nature’s total indifference towards him and his hopeless fate before rising to hopes of redeeming and eternal divine love, only to end with the resigned and disillusioning formulations of past experience: Summer morning is risen & to even it wends & still Im in prison Without any friends […] True love is eternal For God is the giver & love like the soul will Endure – & forever253

Emily and Branwell Bront[ knew Clare and were avid readers and admirers of Byron, and the unavoidable fall from golden dreams to dark realities, disillusion multiplied and exacerbated with man’s transition from childhood and youth to maturity and old age, is a recurring theme of their poems. The speaker of 251 Kleist, Über das Marionettentheater, 1810, in: Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Ilse-Marie Barth et al., Bibliothek deutscher Klassiker, Frankfurt am Main 1991, III. 951. 252 Byron, Poems Original and Translated, I Would I Were A Careless Child, 1808, lines 21–24. 253 Clare, Ballad, MS High Beach, Epping, post 1837, first and last stanzas, in: Last Poems 1837– 1864, ed. cit. I. 40–41.

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Branwell’s “On Caroline” (MS 1842) envies his dead beloved for the rest and oblivion that she enjoys and that he cannot find. All joys and illusions of life are short because realities are too strong and long-lasting to be escaped: No! joy itself is but a shade So well may its remembrance die; But cares – life’s conquerors – never fade, So strong is their reality.254

Byron’s influence on Musset’s four night poems of 1835–1837 is also unmistakable. “La Nuit de Mai”, “La nuit de D8cembre”, “La Nuit d’Ao0t”, and the famous “La Nuit d’Octobre” feature dialogues between a disillusioned lover-poet and his saving Muse. Pouring his fall from dreams of a terrestrial paradise of love into verse gives the poet relief from suffering and new hope; autumn will yield to spring as night will yield to a new day. His imagination is, however, not redemptive in the sense of Positive Romanticism – a prophecy of final reunification and happiness here and hereafter – but rather in the sense of a temporary relief or calm before the next fall from illusion to reality. An absurd circle, symbolized by the revolving hours and seasons, is substituted for a dialectical upward movement – imagination as an anodyne is substituted for imagination as a panacea. Chaos must be domesticated by form-giving, the depression of silence by speaking. Musset’s Muse is a secularized God with a secularized theodicy. She explains the purposeful nature of suffering, but only in the sense as it being an ever-recurring therapy against ever-recurring depressions by writing and reading the poetry of unhappy lovers, without a prospect of growth or ultimate redemption: Aimerais-tu les fleurs, les pr8s et la verdure Les sonnets de P8trarque et le chant des oiseux, Michel-Ange et les arts, Shakespeare et la nature, Si tu n’y retrouvais quelques anciens sanglots?255

Poe’s early poem “The Dream” may also have been inspired by Byron’s poem with the same title (MS July 1816), a vision of life from idealism to despair, as its similarly disillusioned speaker cannot help dreaming and having a cheering beam and guide in his dark world at the price of a cruel awakening to reality. Contrary to Musset’s night poems, night is here the time of sweet illusions, day the time of recurring depression: In visions of the dark night I have dreamed of joy departed – 254 B. Bront[, On Caroline, 12–14 July 1842, lines 25–28, in: Poems, ed. cit. 228. 255 Musset, La Nuit d’Octobre, lines 234–237, in Po8sies complHtes, 326.

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But a waking dream of life and light Hath left me broken-hearted.256

In spite of such doubts and insights, Poe, like Byron, could not help writing on, just as Byron’s John Johnson and the speaker of Poe’s “Ulalume” cannot help fighting and continuing to seek. Later, in Fin-de-SiHcle Decadence and Symbolism heavily influenced by Byron and Poe, artists often made the failure of the Positive Romantic ideal of art as holy service the subject of their works. In his early prose narrative Hand and Soul and in his PRB manifesto “Old and New Art” (both 1849), a sequence of three sonnets, D.G. Rossetti doubted the dialectical accomplishment of that ideal. Art, both painting and poetry, stand in need of faith to read the liber creaturarum and thus reunite this fallen world with that beyond. But the modern artist has lost his faith; his art is no longer holy service, and so he goes on painting and writing and painting and writing in absurd circles although every work tells him that he cannot recapture the past and is doomed to miss his Positive Romantic aim.257 This absurd circle of day and night, spring and autumn, effort and failure, despair and hope again lapsed into despair recurred with special emphasis in late Victorian city poems. Amy Levy, the deracinated lesbian Jewish poet who committed suicide at the age of 27 in 1889 and whose obituary was written by Oscar Wilde, gave it shape in her sonnet “A March Day in London” (1889). There, paradoxically, day brings depression and a dark vision of the city’s streets, whereas night and dreams bring renewed hope of a better day and a more positive, but illusory and evanescent, vision of the city’s fog and lights. The new hope will again be disillusioned with the light of the new day, and writing poems provides neither consolation nor salvation: And o’er, at last, my spirit steals A weary peace; peace that conceals Within its inner depths the grain Of hopes that yet shall flower again.258

It has been amply demonstrated that romantic, narcissistic self-inspection and dream analysis, the individual’s circling around his own ego, was the eighteenthcentury reaction against the dominating cult of light and reason, or, otherwise expressed, the revolt of Pyrrhonism against Enlightenment foundationalism. The universal validity and autocratic hegemony of the Classical Tradition was 256 Poe, Tamerlane and Other Poems, A Dream, 1827, lines 1–4, in: Collected Works, ed. T.O. Mabbott, Cambridge MA 1969–1978, I. 79. 257 Felix Forster, Dante Gabriel Rossetti und der romantische Desillusionismus, Göttingen 2014, 169–184. 258 Levy, A March Day in London, lines 24–27, in: A London Plane-Tree and Other Verse, London 1889, 3.

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challenged. For instance the heroines of the epistolary novels of the Dissenter Samuel Richardson, Pamela and Clarissa, pose a problem that eludes a clear, rational explanation in terms of reality and hypocrisy that Henry Fielding would suggest in his parody Shamela (1742). On the one hand Pamela is pious, obedient, devoted, and frail; on the other she is rebellious, sly, greedy, calculating, intriguing, and strong. There is a criminal undercurrent in her as well as in Clarissa Harlowe, with the contradictory telling names denoting respectability and harlotry simultaneously, quite at variance with paraded virtue and social respectability. Clarissa’s slow death, which fills the four-decker novel’s fourth volume, combines traditional Puritan ars moriendi with an unenlightened pleasure of melancholy in a heroine plumbing the unfathomable depth of her virtuous and sinful soul. It should be added that the Marquis de Sade’s Justine, modelled on Richardson’s heroines, shows the same split, seen in her adventures with the homosexual sadist Marquis de Bressac and the Recollet Friars. When Father Raphael, who has a pious and a criminal side like his monastery, insults her as “double catin”, he is not far off the mark.259 Sade’s model Richardson wrote in the “melancholy forties”, when Walpole built his externally splendid Gothic mansion Strawberry Hill – for nocturnal reveries and drug consumption within – and when graveyard poetry brought very personal nocturnal reveries and meditations into dialogue with enlightened philosophical reflections, juxtaposing contradictory voices of one and the same sentimental speaker in one and the same work; Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1842) or the Dissenter James Hervey’s Meditations among the Tombs (1746–1747). In the nocturnal darkness of graveyards or dying chambers or charnel houses, the blinded eye would turn inward and rediscover the moral chaos of dreams and desires. The clear reason of the Classical Tradition (in the Enlightenment and Neoclassical sense) was eclipsed, the distinction between waking and dreaming was blurred, and the cognition of daylight reality was no longer sure. The imaginative boy in Robert Blair’s The Grave (1743) “hears, or thinks he hears, The Sound of something purring at his Heels”.260 “Night, dark Night, Dark as was Chaos, ’ere the Infant Sun Was roll’d together, or had try’d his Beams Athwart the Gloom profound”, suggested the existence of an unfathomable, sublime, dark, and (in Freudian terms) uncanny reality beyond rational cognition, so that the adult speaker of the poem himself can neither affirm nor deny the existence of ghosts. The vast irregularity of natura naturans no longer allows for a clear, rational distinction between truth and superstition, nor between joy and pain: Well do I know thee by thy trusty Yew, Chearless, unsocial Plant! That loves to dwell 259 Sade, Les infortunes de la vertu, MS 1787, in: Œuvres, ed. cit. II. 58. 260 Blair, The Grave, London 1743, lines 63–64, 6.

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’Midst Sculls and Coffins, Epitaphs and Worms: Where light-heel’d Ghosts, and visionary Shades, Beneath the wan cold Moon (as Fame reports) Embody’d, thick, perform their mystick Rounds. No other Merriment, Dull Tree! is thine.261

A founding text in that line of anti-Enlightenment Pyrrhonism, which claimed uniqueness and originality, was Rousseau’s posthumously published Confessions (MS 1764–1770), contemporary with Horace Walpole’s Gothic Novel that was written in his Gothic mansion, comprised of a dialogue of unconscious dreams and conscious literary work. In his short preface, Rousseau described his Confessions as: […] un ouvrage unique et utile, lequel peut servir de premiHre piHce de comparaison pour l’8tude des hommes, qui certainement est encore / commencer […]262

The narcissism of such Preromantic confessional and self-analytical texts continued the mystical tradition of magia naturalis and generated modern psychoanalysis, with Mesmer and Freud insistently ignoring the fact that they stood in the Romantic rather than Enlightenment tradition.263 In its time, this Romantic “underground psychology”264 met with massive opposition from traditionalists such as the contributors of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Tory and Augustan, who wrote splendid parodies of Thomas De Quincey’s confessions and William Hazlitt’s lectures and essays, denigrating those “Lake School scribblers” as scatter-brained and loquacious psychopaths circling around their own diseased psyche, talking about themselves rather than about their proper subjects, nature or art. Thomas Colley Grattan’s “Confessions of an English Glutton”, for instance, features a speaker, De Quincey’s alter ego, who is proud of his Shandyesque digressions and contradictory life, a tasteless exhibitionist showing the world his respectability without and his chaos within: This is confessedly the age of confession, – the era of individuality – the triumphant reign of the first person singular. Since, then, the whole tribe of which I am an unworthy member, have one by one poured out their souls into the confiding and capacious bosom of the public; since the goodly list of scribblers, great and small, from the author of Eloise to the inventor of Voltigern – since the Wine-drinker, the Opium-eater, the

261 Ibid. lines 13–27, 4. 262 Rousseau, Confessions, publ. posth. 1782, 1789, in: Œuvres complHtes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin – Marcel Raymond, BibliothHque de la Pl8iade, Paris 1959, I. 3. 263 See Heinz Schott, Magie der Natur, I. 98. 264 Edward S. Reed, From Soul to Mind: The Emergence of Psychology from Erasmus Darwin to William James, New Haven CT and London 1997, 13–16.

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Hypochondriac, and the Hypercritic, have in due succession “told their fatal stories out” […]265

This self-inspection, reaching the sublimely dark recesses of the individual soul, also accounts for the multiplicity of psychoanalytic interpretations of Romantic literature.266 The Preromantic and Romantic author has been aptly described as Narcissus “poised at the edge of a pool”, and his deconstructionist interpreter seems to watch him and his image over his shoulder.267 Dreams – from either day or night – induced by meditations among tombs or by soporific and psychedelic drugs or mesmerism, what Wordsworth called “the mind Turned inward”,268 made the dual nature of man and morality especially evident. The Romantic Period phrenology of Gall, Spurzheim, and Cabanis discovered the brain to be an ever-working digestive organ as well as a storehouse of both conscious and unconscious impressions, producing morally uncontrolled and unfiltered dreams in the sleep of individuals, betraying their hidden desires and impulses. Viewed in this light, dreams were no longer mantic or morbid, but diagnostic, hence the numerous invectives of Christian conservatives and advocates of the Classical Tradition against phrenology, as in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine: Of all the asses of the town, None’s like the Phreno-ljgers – […]269

The Romantic exploration of the unconscious revealed hidden primeval forces that determined man’s actions and restricted his ability to make rational decisions. This explains the American naturalist Frank Norris’s association of “Romantic” and “Romance” with the “unplumbed depths of the human heart” and the “unsearched penetralia of the soul of man”.270 Romantic individualism affirmed man’s irreconcilable antinomies and inconsistencies long before Freud, and brought Manichaeanism back into the anthropological discourse. Such dualism was conspicuous in Charles Lamb’s literary self-portrait as the clerk Elia, alternately sober and drunk, sane and mad, realistic and dreamy, male and emasculated, puritanical and sybaritic, altruistic and egoistic, adult and childish, benevolent and malevolent, serious and clownish, central and peripheral, 265 Grattan in: Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 13 (January 1823), 86. Also see D.A. Kent – D.R. Ewen (eds.), Romantic Parodies 1797–1831, London and Toronto 1992, 302–303. 266 Henri Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious, passim. 267 David Punter, The Romantic Unconscious, 172. 268 Wordsworth, The Excursion, 1814, I. 65–66, in: Poetical Works, ed. E. de Selincourt – H. Darbishire, Oxford Standard Authors, Oxford 1959, 592. 269 Noctes Ambrosianae, XIII, in: Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 15 (March 1824), 365, and ibid. 13 (February 1823), 199–206. 270 Norris, A Plea for Romantic Fiction, 1901, in: Novels and Essays, ed. D. Pizer, Library of America, New York 1986, 1168–69. Cf. Zola as a Romantic Writer (1896), ibid. 1106–1108.

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meek and aggressive. The Elia-essay “New Year’s Eve” (January 1821), which bears testimony to Lamb’s introspective Romanticism, shows the adult narrator incapable of finding a true identity in his bundle of contrary characteristics. Even Eila’s memories of his childhood yield no reliable results, because education had adulterated that “other me”, which might have been the true original self: If I know aught of myself, no one whose mind is introspective – and mine is painfully so – can have a less respect for his present identity, than I have for the man Elia. I know him to be light and vain, and humoursome; […] a stammering buffoon; what you will […] From what have I not fallen, if the child I remember was indeed myself, – and not some dissembling guardian, presenting a false identity […]271

Charles Lamb used the heterogeneity and flux of London’s modern metropolitan culture to question the idea of a modern, coherent, unified self.272 His Elia has no fixed identity. In the book collection (1823) of the early Elia essays originally published separately in the London Magazine 1820–1822, Lamb wrote a mock obituary of the allegedly deceased Elia under the pseudonym of Phil-Elia, “A Character of the Late Elia”. Key to the reading of the essays, it described Elia as a contradictory London writer who defied all attempts at definition; an actor of many roles in a theatrical metropolis, […] a singular character […] making himself many, or rendering many unto himself […]273

The “Preface” to Last Essays of Elia (1833) “by a friend of the late Elia”, this obituary was reproduced in a considerably shortened version, but retained all the passages on Elia’s complex identity, which neither allowed others nor himself to reduce him to one character. Alternatively straightforward and ironic, Elia made himself numerous enemies whose perspectives of him were as contradictory as he was himself: With the severe religionist he would pass for a free-thinker ; while the other faction set him down for a bigot, or persuaded themselves that he belied his sentiments. Few understood him, and I am not certain that at all times he quite understood himself.274

Such dualism also informed John Keats’s view of the character of the poet, who has no fixed identity, but enters into the most contrary roles of vice and virtue, 271 Charles Lamb, Elia, New Year’s Eve, 1823, in: Works, ed. William Macdonald, London 1903, I. 56–57. 272 See Simon P. Hull, Charles Lamb, Elia and the London Magazine, London 2010, 181. 273 Phil-Elia [Charles Lamb], A Character of the Late Elia, in: London Magazine, 7 (January 1823), 20. 274 Lamb, Last Essays of Elia, Preface by a Friend of the Late Elia, 1833, in: Works, II. 2.

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having “as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen”.275 It was confirmed by one of the most discussed scandals of the period – the atrocities and cannibalism on the raft of the French frigate M8duse in 1816 – which furnished the subject matter and theme of numerous contemporary tales, dramas, and paintings,276 including the second canto of Byron’s Don Juan. It was symbolized in the two horses of Byron’s Mazeppa; one is tame, faithful, and controlled by its rider, the other – onto whose back Mazeppa is helplessly bound – is wild, bolting, lashed into madness, and altogether uncontrollable.277 The two horses are thus alter egos of a split man. The awareness of what came to be called “man’s divided nature” found expression in literary representations of the body as a fragmented and fragile whole where, most conspicuously in the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, the sense perceptions of schizoid and spasmodic characters are out of tune, segmented, and uncooperative.278 The stability of the self was undermined and the sense of a secure personal identity was threatened, as in the poetry of Byron and Musset or in the dramas of Grillparzer.279 The friends G8rard de Nerval and Heinrich Heine, both admirers of Byron, were aware of their common split natures. Nerval characterized Heine as contradictory like himself: harsh and soft, cruel and tender, na"f and sophisticated, sceptical and credulous, lyrical and prosaic, impassioned and reserved, an ancient and a modern.280 The “individual”, formerly conceived as “indivisible”, was no longer so, and his “identity” appeared no longer as “idem”. The “person”, formerly conceived as “per se una” (on the basis of a false etymology), was no longer homogeneous. Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815), an enormously successful German physician in Vienna and Paris and the pioneer of dynamic psychiatry in Europe, firmly believed that he had discovered a new bodily fluid subject to tidal gravitation. At the time of the discovery and artificial production of electricity, Mesmer was grouped with other Radical philosophers, including Erasmus Darwin and Benjamin Franklin, who also sought to determine the principles of life via material fluxes. Paradoxically, Mesmer was a representative of Enlightenment medicine281 both in his opposition to Johann Joseph Gassner’s religious mass exorcism and in his attempts to find the objectifiable physical basis for his animal magnetism. 1775, the year of Mesmer’s dispute with Gassner in Munich, 275 Keats, Letter to Richard Woodhouse, 27 October 1818, in: Letters, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, Cambridge MA 1958, I, 387. 276 See the cover design: Th8odore G8ricault, Le radeau de la M8duse (1819). 277 Byron, Mazeppa, 1819, lines 57–77 and 358–374. 278 David Punter, The Romantic Unconscious: A Study in Narcissism and Patriarchy, New York NY 1989, 5. 279 The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French, Musset, 551. 280 Louis Untermeyer (ed.), Poems of Heine, Introduction, London: Routledge 1923, V. 281 Schott, Magie der Natur, I. 482–487 and 616–645.

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has been considered the founding year of dynamic psychiatry.282 Experimenting with patients, usually in a trance induced by magnetic operation for the purposes of regulating the supposed physical fluid, Mesmer sought to heal. His Romantic followers, by contrast, put patients into a trance seeking to gain new insights into the human soul, especially in the cases of “prophetic” madmen and madwomen whose souls promised glimpses of true original human nature unadulterated by reason and conventions. The German theologian and physician Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert (1780–1860), for instance, began to decode the symbolism of dreams long before Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung revealed double, irreconcilable characters in one and the same patient.283 Though Schubert’s dream analysis was directed outward instead of inward, in contrast to Freud’s, both psychologists shared the Romantic concept of the dream as an original dark language of images in need of individual decoding.284 Furthermore, the Marquis de Puys8gur, Mesmer’s disciple, doubted the existence of a universal fluid and reduced animal magnetism to psychic influence or domination of the doctor over his patient, including the possibility of hypnotic abuse as in the case of the evil Puys8gurist Alban in Hoffmann’s tale Der Magnetiseur (1814).285 Mesmer’s enlightened theory of a physically objectifiable fluid in animal magnetism thus came to be appropriated, functionalized, mystified, and demonized by Romanticism, quite against Mesmer’s intention and will. A secret, demonic character quite opposite to the public appearance of the mesmerized (and later hypnotized) patient, and quite unknown to him, became apparent in the widespread public practice of mesmerism. Beginning with the haunting phantasmagorias of childhood, there were eruptions from a sublime domain behind what reason might elucidate so that, as Thomas De Quincey used to show from case studies (including his own), the most inconspicuous persons could commit the cruellest atrocities, driven by “the shadowy projections, umbras and penumbras” from “the unsearchable depths of man’s nature”.286 Thus, his Suspiria de Profundis essay “The Dark Interpreter” (posth. 1891) preceded C.G. Jung’s concept of “der Schatten”, man’s ever-present repressed or projected impulses and tendencies: 282 H. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious, 57. It must, however, be maintained against Ellenberger that Mesmer did not discover, but merely contribute to the exploration of what later came to be called ‘das Unbewusste’, translated into English as ‘the unconscious’. 283 For particulars of Mesmer’s biography, experiments, and theories see Ellenberger, 58–69. 284 Schott, Magie der Natur, I. 564–567. Freud was famously reluctant to acknowledge his predecessors in psychoanalysis. 285 Alban working hypnotic evil on his designed victim Maria is negatively contrasted against his friend Theobald, whose hypnotic faculties bring about the cure of his beloved Auguste. 286 De Quincey, Suspiria de Profundis, The Dark Interpreter, in: Posthumous Works, ed. Alexander H. Japp, London 1891–93, I. 9.

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There are creative agencies in every part of human nature, of which the thousandth part could never be revealed in one life.287

Brought up as a representative of the Enlightenment, Horace Walpole had already felt the natural reaction of suppressed passions and emotions, as did the socio-culture of his whole generation. As the modern classical scholar and literary critic Frank Laurence Lucas perceptively observed, “Romantic literature is a dream-picture of life, providing sustenance and fulfilment for impuIses cramped by society or reality”, so that “the Bastille of those twin oppressors, Probability and Propriety, was stormed and obliterated”.288 This eruption of the Dionysian part of man from its Apollonian confinement naturally brought forth two very contrary sides of Romanticism: paradisiacal dreams of millennial perfection, opposed by nightmarish dreams of disease, perversion, madness, suffering, degeneration, and ultimately death fostered by such unforeseen, disastrous, and chaos-generating events as the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, the Gordon Riots of 1780, and the French Revolution. Le romantisme, c’est la r8volution. Together with dreams, Enlightenment reason had repressed elementary human primeval fear or Urangst, which rebounded in the formation of Romanticism, especially in the Gothic genres that reanimated the pagan Classical Tradition’s concept of fate. These combined with Calvinism and its fear of reprobation, which the Enlightenment had managed to subdue as irrational but not eradicate, as in the cases of the Calvinist education of Byron and the Calvinist creed of Maturin. In Tristram Shandy (1759–1767) and Jacques le fataliste (MS 1773–1775), Laurence Sterne and Denis Diderot tried in vain to satirically oppose the vogue of fatalism, necessitarianism, and illuminism that swept over Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Rational lumiHres ended in irrational illuminisme. Novels and dramas whose heroes and heroines were fated from birth and whose attempts at lives of self-determination failed became legion – Charles Dickens later discredited them in David Copperfield (1850). Such vague primeval fear, with its presentiment of an evil fate, is expressed in the aria of Max in Friedrich Kind’s Romantic opera Der Freischütz (1821), set to music by Carl Maria von Weber : Unsichtbare Mächte grollen, Bange Ahnung füllt die Brust.

287 Ibid. 288 F.L. Lucas, The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal, Cambridge 1936, in: Robert F. Gleckner – Gerald E. Enscoe (ed.), Romanticism: Points of View, 1962, 2nd edn. Detroit 1975, 127 and 130.

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Doch mich umgarnen finstre Mächte! Mich fasst Verzweiflung, foltert Spott!289

It also dominates the feelings of Polidori’s tragically fated Ernestus Berchtold whenever he contemplates the towering mountains and vast solitudes of the Swiss Alps where he grew up as an orphan of illegitimate and obscure birth, and where men, by comparison, appear as mere grains of dust swept by irresistible and invisible dark powers: I always felt an inward shuddering and awe at the sight of my native wildness. […] I seem always to crouch benath some invisible being whose power is infinite, and which I am conscious I cannot resist.290

The return of these irrational fears was fostered by the vogue for mesmerism that swept across Europe: apparent in Hoffmann’s novella “Das öde Haus” in his Nachtstücke (1816–1817). The first-person narrator Theodor – either visionary or madman – is himself both involved in uncanny and mysterious adventures as well as being a patient under mesmeric treatment, and asks the question whether mysterious forces exist outside man that dominate him and deprive him of his free will. His interlocutors, discussing mesmerism with him, disagree on the origin of such demonic forces, while all affirm their existence and fear their devastating invasion.291 Theodor’s initial distinction between “das Wunderliche”, which is visible, and “das Wunderbare”, the inscrutable, subterranean root of “das Wunderliche”,292 combined with the barren house’s fairy-tale nature as well as its old keeper’s secrets – and reinforced by a shrieking madwoman in the house’s attic and the keeper’s diabolical black dog – sets the tone for the novella’s allowance for hidden forces influencing or determining the lives of selfstyled rational and enlightened men. These re-erupting, vague fears of an insidious fate could be domesticated by a metaphysical superstructure relating them to an ultimately benevolent divine will, as in the works of the Positive Romantics Novalis, Wordsworth, and Hawthorne. Alternatively, and worse, they could be relegated to divine predestination which needed no justification, as in the case of Maturin. Worst of all, they could be seen as blind contingencies, demoniacal and vicious tortures inflicted on helpless man as in the works of the Romantic Disillusionists Klingemann, Kleist, Byron, Grillparzer, Hoffmann, and Poe – often in the form of self-fulfilling prophecies drawn from vague fears and revenants temporarily repressed in the recently explored unconscious. Novalis’s dictum “Wo keine 289 Weber, Der Freischütz, 1821, I/2 and 4. 290 Polidori, Ernestus Berchtold, London 1819, 11–12. 291 Hoffmann, Nachtstücke, Das öde Haus, 1816–1817, in: Sämtliche poetischen Werke, I. 751– 753. 292 Ibid. I. 734.

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Götter sind, walten Gespenster” in his pious Positive Romantic treatise Die Christenheit oder Europa (MS 1799) identifies these two possibilities.293 Grillparzer’s Negative Romantic Schicksalstragödie Die Ahnfrau (1817), for example, figures a gespenst that accompanies an arbitrary, even sadistic, fate that unjustly eradicates a whole family for a sin committed in a former generation through a succession of mere trite, everyday accidents: Zufälle quite unrelated to any divine will. Through the generations of the Borotin family, man appears as a dual compound of light and darkness, virtue and vice; a plaything of fate and no longer a rational creature capable of fully vanquishing his primeval fears and fully controlling his life. Following Walpole, man’s dual nature became a subject in numerous Gothic novels featuring dual characters – Lewis’s Ambrosio, Charlotte Dacre’s Berenza, Hoffmann’s Medardus, and Godwin’s St Leon, as well as in Piranesi’s Gothic Carceri with their unsearchable subterranean intricacies – and they reappeared in Byron’s experience with and literary construction of himself: alternately arrogant and affable, cold and warm-harted, evil and virtuous, good and dangerous to know. There is almost nothing one can say about Byron of which the opposite is not also true. Caroline Lamb’s Ada Reis (1823) uses introductory pages on Manichaeanism to makes us aware that in Gothic fiction since Walpole a primeval principle of light is opposed by a primeval principle of darkness, and that human nature partakes of both. The evil demon Kabkarra and the good angel Zevahir, who contend for men’s souls in Ada Reis, are half-brothers. Ada Reis, the evil criminal based on Byron, is kind and tender to his virtuous daughter Fiormonda, just as Fiormonda’s beloved Count Condulmar both loves and spurns her in ever-changing Byronic fits of emotion and scorn. Fiormonda herself is alternately decent and evil, and when she has repented and died a poisonous tree, indicating the ineradicable poison in her nature, grows on her grave. It is a metaphorical poison, similar to that which Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Rappaccini cannot neutralize in his virtuous daughter Beatrice without killing her. Recent scholarship has pointed out that the Gothic text arose around the same time that Kant made the Enlightenment aware of the limits of reason, and that Gothic novels, tales, and dramas are psycho-narrations that explore the epistemological sublime and leave antinomies unreconciled.294 If, as has been claimed, De Quincey’s Confessions is the prose counterpart of Wordsworth’s Prelude, it is a negative, disillusioning one that does not cure the psyche.295 Giambattista Piranesi’s Gothic Antichit/ romane and Carceri d’invenzione (late 293 Novalis, Die Christenheit oder Europa, MS 1799, in: Werke und Briefe, ed. Alfred Kelletat, Munich 1953, 416. 294 Marshall Brown, The Gothic Text, Stanford 2005, passim. 295 Joel Faflak, Romantic Psychoanalysis, Albany NY 2008, 160.

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1740s), with their unsearchable subterranean intricacies as well as the opium dreams described in De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822, with references to Coleridge’s reports of his opium dreams), run parallel to the subterranean passages and caverns in Gothic literature, both threatening and disorientating man.296 That unconscious, shadowy world behind the narrow world of waking reason remains unelucidated, endless, and unfathomable below, just as the universe is unfathomable above. Instead of the traditional ascent to light and knowledge, the opium eater loses himself in gloom and confusion: Again elevate your eye, and a still more aerial flight of stairs is beheld: and again is poor Piranesi busy on his aspiring labours: and so on, until the unfinished stairs and Piranesi are both lost in the upper gloom of the hall.297

In his opium dreams, the caring father, respectable journalist, and rational Kantian philosopher and philologist De Quincey would descend into a bottomless hell below or ascend endless Piranesian staircases to that which lay above. Hell and heaven appear as mere myths of contrary, yet complementary, parts of the human mind. There was neither a Fall of angels nor a Fall of man.298 When meeting De Quincey, Thomas Carlyle, for instance, saw him as an amalgam of contradictions: a little child that had been in hell.299 This Janus-faced nature of man and the world shapes not only the sceptical anthropology but also the structure of De Quincey’s Confessions. They lose themselves in endless digressions and disorientate the reader, blending and interweaving laughter and tears, the pleasures and pains of opium, innocence and experience, motion and paralysis, a drug-trafficker simultaneously beatific and devilish, a pettifogging attorney simultaneously fraudulent and honest, and an adult speaker alternately infantile and mature, outcast and bourgeois. It also shapes De Quincey’s essay “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” (1827–1854), featuring a highly cultivated and respectable speaker fascinated with the perfect murder, discovering the criminal impulse in the thought and secret lives of the most highly estimated philosophers and literati (Aristotle, Descartes, Hobbes, Coleridge). An early advocate of l’art pour l’art, he recognizes the importance of ethics, but radically separates ethics from aesthetics when he describes the murderer as a Romantic poet who, in the shaping of his work of art, regresses to atavistic brutality. He thus defines the perfect murder 296 De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, 1822, in: Works, ed. Grevel Lindop, Pickering Masters, 22 vols., London 2000–2003, II. 68. All references are to this edition, unless otherwise indicated. 297 Ibid. 298 De Quincey, The Principle of Evil, in: Posthumous Works, I. 168. 299 Gregory Dart’s review of Robert Morrison, The English Opium-Eater, London 2009, in TLS, 5584 (9 April 2010), 13.

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not as a rational plan or cruel performance but as the accomplished deed, and only when the murderer has escaped persecution and the audience need no longer have moral scruples about its enjoyment without the offer of help to the victim: Enough has been given to morality ; now comes the turn of Taste and the Fine Arts. A sad thing it was, no doubt, very sad; but we can’t mend it. Therefore let us make the best of a bad matter; and, as it is impossible to hammer anything out of it for moral purpose, let us treat it aesthetically […]300

Ethics and the question of guilt are also excluded from De Quincey’s last famous essay, “The English Mail-Coach”, published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine as late as 1849, something of a shock to Victorian readers. As before, the drug-addicted narrator elaborated on the double-faceted nature of things, with the mail-coach being alternately the bearer of good news (victories) and bad (missing lists), and the coachman alternately a good friend and an evil monster – life and death, vitality and apocalypse. The coach’s speed is simultaneously dangerous and enjoyable, and the entranced speaker cares little about the peril that his ecstatic enjoyment of speed brings about. When the horses bolt and passions run high, the course of life is no longer controllable by reins and reason. Neither is the act of writing in that Shandyesque narrative, with its intertextual reference to Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67) and Tristram’s unruly pen under the impact of inspiration, invariably compared to bolting horses: “Great wits jump”.301 A noteworthy literary criminal of this type found in a realistic, non-Gothic historical novel before Byron and De Quincey is Kleist’s eponymous hero Michael Kohlhaas (1810), “einer der rechtschaffensten und zugleich entsetzlichsten Menschen seiner Zeit”.302 Misled by his instincts and fallible moral sense – a typical motif of Romantic Disillusionism – Kohlhaas’s humanity and sense of justice turn to their polar opposites when confronted with a very minor act of injustice – the tragic counterpart to Eve’s lover Ruprecht in Kleist’s comedy Der zerbrochene Krug (1806). In contrast to Positive Romanticism, all human feelings are fallible. The honest horse-dealer Kohlhaas, unable to control his passions and being quite blind to the fact that his revenge affects the innocent more than the guilty, commits acts of arson and murder. His paradoxical double nature reflects that of the Roman-German Empire, with its emperor and electors, along with that of the Elector of Brandenburg. Ultimately it reveals the split in the constitution of the world. There are parallels to the representation of the nature of man in Kleist’s short story “Das Erdbeben in Chili” (1807). Though the 300 De Quincey, On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts, 1827, in: Works, VI. 115. 301 De Quincey, The English Mail-Coach, 1849, ed. cit.. XVI. 411. 302 Kleist, Michael Kohlhaas, 1810, in: Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, II. 13.

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individual characters show either their good or evil sides, the mass is doublefaced; alternately pious and friendly or pious and murderous.303 Such split human nature would render the expectation of Paradise Regained after the downfall of the ancien r8gime highly improbable. The very limited happiness that man can find lies in resigning traditional morality and coming to terms with his split nature. In Kleist’s short novel “Die Marquise von O … ” (1808), the titular heroine finds that Graf F … , who had heroically saved her life in war, had also taken advantage of her swoon and left her with a child. She learns to spurn public scandal, to overcome moral rigidity, and to accept his (and her own) heterogeneous human nature.304 In Kleist’s short tale “Die heilige Cäcilie oder die Gewalt der Musik” (1810), this dual nature of man manifests itself in the four respectable young men who go to Aachen on serious legal business, then decide to destroy the city’s nunnery in pseudo-religious iconoclastic turmoil reminiscent of the outbreak of the French Revolution in the Age of Reason. The young men’s split natures are mirrored in a multiplicity of details, such as the split nature of church, ceremony, and music. Every positive has a dark side. The music of the sacred oratorium, which restores harmony and order in the crowd, drives the iconoclasts into madness and internment in the municipal mental asylum. The conversion of the iconoclasts is no true conversion, but madness in its positive and negative aspects; both pleasure and pain. “Die Gewalt der Musik”, with the double meaning of “Gewalt” in German, together with many other narrative contradictions contributes to Kleist’s subversion – or even parody – of what he pretended to write only a year before his suicide, a legend of saints.305 In the sceptical anthropology from Horace Walpole and Franz Anton Mesmer via Edgar Allan Poe to Sigmund Freud, reason and the passions tend to clash irreconcilably. The impact of mesmerism on earlier nineteenth-century thought, both in Europe and the United States, was even greater than the impact of psychoanalysis on later nineteenth- and earlier twentieth-century thought, with numerous scientific publications, learned journals, government commissions, doctoral dissertations, clinics practising mesmerism, and popularizations spreading its terminology into common usage. Consequently, Hoffmann and Poe were not the only Romantics interested in mesmerism or animal magnetism, including its potential of imposition for monetary profit or abuse for sexual domination;306 nor was Charles Dickens the only Victorian inheritor of the

303 Kleist, Das Erdbeben in Chili, 1807, ed. cit. II. 189–222; in particular II. 213–217. 304 Kleist, Die Marquise von O …, 1808, ed. cit. II. 143–186. 305 Kleist, Die Heilige Cäcilie oder die Gewalt der Musik, 1810, ed. cit. II. 287–313; in particular II. 303. 306 See for example the character of Alban in Hoffmann’s novella Der Magnetiseur (1814).

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Romantic interest in mesmerism.307 Contemporaries habituated to a homogeneous view of man had to come to terms with the discovery of the fact that the most splendid virtue and the darkest vice, incorporating the highest respectability and the lowest abjectness, could coexist (though not cooperate) in the same person. In terms of what later came to be called “associative identity disorder”, popularly confused with “schizophrenia”, this meant a breakdown in the relationship between thoughts, feelings, and actions, calling into question man’s traditionally taught Platonic and Christian interaction of reason and the passions. Rousseau, in his self-analytic dialogues Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques (MS 1775–1776) that were written in the wake of his earlier Confessions (MS 1764–1770), and Lermontov, in his Pechorin’s self-analytic confession in A Hero of Our Time (1840), both describe this sceptical anthropology’s concept of the nature of man in terms of a modern disease. Pechorin is a split personality, one part acting without control, the other judging instead of controlling: ‘I weigh and analyse my emotions and actions with close interest, but complete detachment. There are two men within me – one lives in the full sense of the word, the other reflects and judges him.’308

Such a contrary mindset makes Pechorin exempt from logical analysis, and he remains ultimately “indefinite” (in Poe’s sense). When he confesses the sufferings of his childhood to the Russian Princess Mary, echoing the sufferings that Byron confessed to Thomas Moore, we remain unsure of where truth ends and fiction begins. Nor can we be sure how far Pechorin’s confession is the monologue of a reliable narrator laying his wounded heart bare or that of an unreliable narrator imposing upon the feeling heart of a female reader of Byron whom he only wishes to seduce.309 Pechorin finished his novel a few years after Pushkin’s Evgeny Onegin (1825– 1833), modelling his hero on Pushkin’s. Onegin, the Russian-Byronic “superfluous man” at odds with a chimerical world order, is a mixture of refinement and rudeness, like the verse novel’s style itself, most conspicuous in his killing of his friend Lansky in a duel for a girl that he does not love. Benjamin Disraeli’s Vivian Grey, the eponymous aristocratic hero of his first novel begun in 1826 at the age of twenty-one, in the wake of Byron’s death which had profoundly shocked him, is a Byronic hero in his mixture of incompatible contradictions. Learned and shallow in the classics, Platonist and Sophist, ideHere, the frequent change of perspective and narrative situation leaves just as much doubt about the scientific seriousness of mesmerism as is the case in Poe’s mesmeric tales. 307 Lind, Poe and Mesmerism, in: PMLA, 62 (1947), 1077–1078, and Fred Kaplan, Dickens and Mesmerism, Princeton NJ 1975, 6–33. 308 Lermontov, 4Va_Z ^QiVT_ SaV]V^Y, 1840, transl. cit. 134. 309 Ibid. 139–140.

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alist and utilitarian, unscrupulous and conscience-stricken, hilarious and melancholy, lionized man about town and romantic solitary, man of intrigues and man of feeling, Vivian Grey mirrors the split character of the ShandyesqueByronic narrators of Beppo (1818) and Don Juan (1819–1824) with his wild digressions, and epitomizes the split character of society around him. His adored Mrs Felix Lorraine, who loves yet tries to murder him, is his double.310 After his disillusionment and fall as a politician, the sprightly and calculating Don Juan commutes into a melancholy and resigned Childe Harold wandering through Europe. Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Pelham, the eponymous aristocratic hero of his first successful novel of1828, was equally inspired by Byron and Disraeli, and in its turn probably inspired Georg Büchner. Contrasting with his brilliant and reckless friend Lord Vincent, however, Pelham inexplicably combines youthful recklessness, vanity, and political careerism with a deep seriousness and feeling of responsibility for mankind, causing him to oppose Vincent’s political intrigues.311 As such, Pelham carries symptoms of the behaviour of Byron as a young and arrogant politician in the House of Lords, as well as of Bulwer himself, who modelled him on his experience of his own self-division – a fact reflected in the numerous doppelgangers, alter egos, and mirrors in his novels.312 And Job Jonson, the charming villain whom Pelham engages to convict a murderer, is simultaneously honest and dishonest, cultivated and vulgar – an endless masquerader and actor, a realistic Goethean London underworld Mephisto. A similar mixture of vice and virtue can be seen in Bulwer-Lytton’s crime novel Eugene Aram (1832), whose titular hero is a combination of docility and aggression, sensibility and misanthropy, highlighting every man’s criminal capacity.313 The same is true of the titular hero of Bulwer’s historical novel Rienzi (1835), which projects the causalities and circumstances of the French Revolution onto the early Renaissance Roman Revolution of 1347. The plebeian Cola (Nicola) di Rienzi, who brings the populace of Rome to rebel against the city’s corrupt aristocrats, is reflected in his aristocratic antagonist Walter de Montreal. The noble, educated, gallant, lovable Rienzi is also ambitious, vindictive, proud, and calculating, whereas his antagonist Montreal can equally embody the same 310 Disraeli, Vivian Grey, 1826–1827, 1853, book III, chapter 5, in: The Bradenham Edition of the Novels and Tales of Benjamin Disraeli, ed. Philip Guedalla, London 1926–1927, I. 112. Text of Disraeli’s later revised edition of 1853, when he had changed from Romantic and Radical to Tory like Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey long before him. 311 Bulwer-Lytton, Pelham, 1828, in: Novels and Tales, IV. 155–158. 312 Allan Conrad Christensen (ed.), The Subverting Vision of Bulwer Lytton, Introduction, Newark DE 2004, 10. 313 Allan Conrad Christensen, Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Fiction of New Regions, Athens GA 1976, 64, and Heather Worthington, Against the Law : Bulwer’s Fictions of Crime, in: The Subverting Vision of Bulwer Lytton, 65.

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negative characteristics as much as their positive opposites;314 Rienzi and Montreal are each other’s double. The chapter that narrates their first meeting is meaningfully entitled “The Ambitious Citizen, and the Ambitious Soldier”.315 Significantly, Bulwer-Lytton’s novels were a haunting read for Edgar Allan Poe,316 not least with respect to their Humean concept of the nature of man that doubted stable identity. Poe’s laudatory review of Rienzi in his Southern Literary Messenger (1836) credited Bulwer’s literary work with kindling contrary passions, giving him a profound insight into human nature and making the reader “a wiser if not a better man” through scepticism.317 Conversely, Bulwer adopted Poe’s concept of indefiniteness, refusing to decide whether uncanny appearances are supernatural realities or natural projections of the mind. Poe, like Byron, denied both the moral mission of literature and heterogeneous man’s capability for improvement. In this context, the biographical facts that Bulwer contrived to have his estranged wife Rosina confined in a madhouse and that Rosina took similar revenge as that which Caroline Lamb had taken on Byron – by making her “tormentor” the Gothic villain of a novel, Cheveley, or, The Man of Honour (Paris 1839) – should be noted. Glenarvon and Cheveley were the same type of inconsistent hero split between good and evil, brilliancy and darkness. The Romantic Period was also one of experiments in impersonation. John Wilson of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine was at his best when, in “Noctes Ambrosianae”, he impersonated James Hogg, the “Ettrick Shepherd” with broad Scots who posed as a primitive ploughman poet in Burns’ wake. Hogg impersonated Burns, and Wilson impersonated Hogg. Keats was of the opinion that a good dramatist should not be egotistical but a participator in, and impersonator of, all the characters of his creation. The most famous impersonator on the stage was the actor Charles Mathews, famous both in Britain and the United States, whose varied roles from Shakespearean villain to old Scottish lady were so deceptive that it was said he could even grow a crooked nose when necessary.318 The growing awareness during the Romantic Period that old, popular superstitions concerning wraiths and doubles expressed a psychological truth 314 See the description of Walter de Montreal in Bulwer-Lytton, Rienzi, The Last of the Tribunes, 1835, in: Novels and Tales, IV. 52. 315 Bulwer-Lytton, Rienzi, 1835, book II, chapter 4, II. 88–96. 316 Marta Miquel-Baldellou, Poe’s English Double: Bulwer-Lytton as a Transatlantic Haunting Presence, in: Meridian Critic Analele, 15 (2009), 117–127. 317 Poe in: Southern Literary Messenger, 2 (February 1836), in: Essays and Reviews, ed. G.R. Thompson, Library of America, New York 1984, 142. 318 Anne Jackson Mathews, Memoirs of Charles Mathews, Comedian, 4 vols., London 1838, passim.

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– the split nature of man – was the origin of the Romantic doppelganger. Two different personalities united in one person – a virtuous man and a dark sinner, a peaceful and an aggressive Janus, a Dr Jekyll and a Mr Hyde – came to be fictionalized in two contrasting, yet mysteriously connected characters; literary doubles. The time-honoured doppelganger motif, that of mistaken identity as in the fable of Amphitryo and Alcmene, thus became psychologized and demonized.319 This is most clearly seen in Heinrich von Kleist’s comedy Amphitryon (1807), where the old classical and the new romantic concepts of the doppelganger interact, as do Greek paganism and Christian mysticism – a rupture of the Classical Tradition that Goethe found fault with.320 What distinguishes Kleist’s treatment of the matter of Amphitryo from earlier versions by Plautus and MoliHre is his central concern with Alcmene’s ultimately unsuccessful search for her own and Amphitryo’s identity, even in her reliance on her sensibility and visions in default of rational cognition. Kleist’s plays teem with dreams and somnambulism, which are not only mantic but also allow for deep insights into their heterogeneously constructed split characters: amalgams of nobility and vulgarity, egoism and altruism, haughtiness and humility, virtue and crime. His novellas, such as “Die Verlobung in St. Domingo” (1810), evince this split on all levels including ethics, epistemology, race, and gender. Virtue and vice, sensibility and cruelty, gratitude and ingratitude, truth and deception, tyranny and slavery, love and hatred, faithfulness and treason – all show up in the same individuals, symbolically mirrored by the fact that a large number of the characters are mulattoes. The plot’s background – the French Revolution of 1789–1799 and the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804 –, was contemporary, acting to shape Kleist’s own experience of man’s heterogeneity in whites as well as blacks, and men as well as women. Man’s blind instinct for revenge as the polar opposite to his passion for freedom and justice and liberation in the name of humanity, leads to new slavery and new inhumanity. In Hoffmann’s novella “Der Sandmann”, Nathanael and Lothar are close friends before one of Nathanael’s acts of madness incites mutual rage and blind desire to kill each other in a duel, before Clara’s intervention causes the hatred to revert to a close, loving friendship just as abruptly as hatred had seized them. Sanity and insanity, clear reason and dark fears – like the conscious and the unconscious – appear as the two sides of heterogeneous human nature which are no longer reconcilable.321 Franz Grillparzer’s Byronic tragedy Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen (1831) endows the classical protagonists Hero and Leander each with a double, Naukleros and Ianthe, to expose their dual natures: the chaste Hero turns into the 319 Elisabeth Frenzel, Motive der Weltliteratur, Doppelgänger, Stuttgart 1976, 1992, 100–110. 320 See Goethe’s review of Kleist’s play. 321 Renate Lachmann, Erzählte Phantastik, Frankfurt am Main 2002, 164.

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vital Ianthe, the timid Leander into the intrepid Naukleros, and vice versa. Grillparzer had, from early youth, taken a firm stand against the Romantic Platonism of August Wilhelm Schlegel (and his alleged Viennese disciples, the dramatists Heinrich and Matthäus von Collin). In his Viennese Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur (1809–1811), Schlegel had found fault with the sceptical Greek tragedian Euripides for his broken characters such as Medea and Heracles, whereas Grillparzer made such antithetically mixed characters his protagonists. Grillparzer’s early satire on the Collin brothers had Heinrich von Collin, libelled as an ignorant talkative fool and viciously misnamed “Kodallin” in the Classical Tradition of Western Streitkultur, speak self-damning aesthetic and stylistic nonsense on the need for idealized homogeneous protagonists, heavenly and poetical though far removed from nature, as well as being boring in the eyes of the unthinking multitude.322 In Grillparzer’s Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen, the high priest, Hero’s uncle, is the only homogeneous character, but he turns out to be a self-deluded, pious impostor to maintain the fictions of the holiness of his temple and the integrity of man, removing the dead bodies before leaving the last scene by turning his back on human reality. The Spanish King, in Grillparzer’s Die Jüdin von Toledo (MS ca 1855, posth. 1872), is both wise and stupid, his split character reflected in mirrors, wax figures, and a portrait central to the play’s plot as manipulated by his beloved Jewess Rahel. Symbolizing the multiple nature of man, they resurge from the fiction of Jean Paul and Hoffmann. Grillparzer’s heroes are anti-heroes, weak and broken and vulnerable characters with double identities, and his dramatic plots evolve from this disillusioned, realistic, and sceptical view of human nature.323 In one of his numerous criminal case studies, De Quincey described the outbreak of extreme evil in a decent and seemingly harmless farm labourer as the phantasmagoria of a dark figure suddenly standing beside the poor man in the perpetration of his crime.324 The principle of evil is firmly rooted in man’s double-faced nature and cannot be eradicated by overcoming “things as they are”, and returning to an imaginary, primitive state of equality, as William Godwin and other Radicals had propagated. The titular hero of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is subtitled a Modern Prometheus (MS 1816, 1818), following her new Negative Romantic reading of the myth – a brilliant but irresponsible Demiurge, a creator and a murderer, his creature, the Monster, with his good nature and evil potential is his double. If Victor Frankenstein stands for the modern (male) scientist in the infancy of modern creative science, especially of 322 Grillparzer. Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum, 1809, in: Werke, ed. Paul Stapf, Tempel Klassiker, Berlin and Darmstadt 1965, II. 226–227. 323 Alexander von Bormann (ed.), Ungleichzeitigkeiten der europäischen Romantik, Würzburg 2006, 412. 324 De Quincey, The Dark Interpreter, in: Posthumous Works, I. 9.

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the exploration and uses of electricity (Benjamin Franklin, Erasmus Darwin, Luigi Galvani, Alessandro Volta), the novel is sceptical of progress by imagining its monstrous and destructive underside. Unlike Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, The Modern Prometheus has no Paradise Regained; the novel begins and ends in the Blakean ice. Mary Shelley’s short story “The Transformation” (1831), possibly inspired by Byron’s unfinished drama The Deformed Transformed (MS Pisa 1822), features Guido, an unreliable first-person narrator and young nobleman split between nobility and fierceness, benevolence and malevolence of character – like his father. He is doubled by an ugly dwarf who assumes his body in a devil’s pact and is heavily wounded in a duel with his double. This deformed dwarf from the dark depths of the tumultuous sea is an extrapolation of the criminal part of the handsome youth; his doppelganger (as Mr Hyde is the evil extrapolation of Dr Jekyll). The short story’s title is ironic as it denotes both Guido’s physical transformation into a fiend and his spiritual transformation into a penitent: his re-transformation after his chance victory in the deadly duel with his doppelganger leaves him bent and pale, and his conversion leaves him proud, as before. A decade later, Bulwer-Lytton wrote Newgate novels on dark eighteenth-century criminals and murderers who were respectable citizens by daylight: the admired philanthropist Paul Clifford (1830) and the famous philologist Eugene Aram (1832). For the Victorians, such split characters held a secret fascination in spite of publicly manifested disgust, as did the Victorian descendants of the Byronic heroes – witness Charles Dickens’s James Steerforth in David Copperfield (1850), James Harthouse in Hard Times (1854), and Henry Gowan in Little Dorrit (1857).325 Half a century later, Robert Louis Stevenson was still harkening back to the Byronic heroes when he created his memorable and “inexplicably mix’d”326 double characters Long John Silver, Deacon Brodie, James and Henry Durie of Durrisdeer, and Archie and Adam Weir of Hermiston. And so was Arthur Conan Doyle in his Sherlock Holmes works where the mastermind detective and counterpart mastermind antagonist Dr Moriarty, each the other’s doppelganger and both decent citizens with a decadent and criminal turn of mind, are mirrored in the double nature of London as splendour and cesspool of the British Empire. And there spread rumours that Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone was Jack the Ripper, a philanthropist in public by day and a murderer of prostitutes in secret by night. The insight into the heterogeneous nature of human identity had become too deep to be denied, even for the Victorians. This Manichaean or Humean view of the inexplicably mixed and illogically 325 Vincent Newey, Rival Cultures: Charles Dickens and the Byronic Legacy, in: Andrew Radford – Mark Sandy (eds.), Romantic Echoes in the Victorian Era, Aldershot 2008, 67–83. 326 Byron, Lara, 1814, 1. 289, in: Complete Poems, III. 224.

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split nature of man was diametrically opposed to Christian Enlightenment anthropology. Thomas Love Peacock tried to dismiss it as a mere fantastic construction resulting from fashionable Romantic mysticism and an irrational love of sublime obscurity. In his satirical novel Nightmare Abbey (1818), Peacock caricatured his confused Romantic “lover of shadows”, Mr Flosky, to make a ‘[…] single virtue not only redeem all the real and manifest vices of the character, but make them actually pass for necessary adjuncts, and indispensable accompaniments and characteristics of the said virtue.’327

Romantic Disillusionism doubted the ultimate homogeneity of man and the world, suspecting an irreparable split and fundamental disharmony. BulwerLytton’s Pelham (1828), for instance, features the dark, calculating villain Thomas Thornton who blackmails Pelham’s friend Reginald Glanville over a murder which he had himself committed, acting so as ultimately to betray himself against his own well-calculated interest: Villains have passions as well as honest men; and they will, therefore, forfeit their own interest in obedience to those passions, while the calculations of prudence invariably suppose, that that interest is their only rule.328

The illogical impulse that actuates Thornton is exactly what Poe was to call “the imp of the perverse”, and Baudelaire “la dualit8 de l’homme”. Poe, a keen reader and American reviewer of Bulwer-Lytton, knew his most popular novel just as Baudelaire knew Poe’s work. In Poe’s fiction, the disrupted connection between “feeling” and “reasoning”, as well as what is called “the primitive impulse of the perverse”, or man’s paradoxical compulsion to destroy himself against his most obvious vital interests, confirmed Baudelaire’s view of the split of human nature, “la dualit8 de l’homme” resulting in “la dualit8 de l’art”, expressing nature’s increasing approximation of chaos and le grand n8ant.329 In his Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Allan Poe (1857), he praised Poe as the rediscoverer of man’s primordial perversity and inconsistency, “qui fait que l’homme est sans cesse et / la fois homicide et suicide, assassin et bourreau”.330 Will and insight, instinct and reason, sensibility and intellect all clash like attraction and repulsion, or like the styles of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan. It was no longer considered possible to act in concert between contrary impulses, as in Neoclassical and Positive Romantic ethics and aesthetics. Faith in the homogeneity of human 327 Peacock, Nightmare Abbey, chapter 6, in: Novels, ed. David Garnett, London 1948, 383. 328 Bulwer-Lytton, Pelham, 1828, in: Novels and Tales, VI. 286. 329 Poe, Mesmeric Revelation (1844) and The Imp of the Perverse (1845); and Baudelaire, Le peintre de la vie moderne (1863), in: Œuvres complHtes, ed. cit. 1154. Also see Kupfer, Die künstlichen Paradiese, Stuttgart and Weimar 1966, 545. 330 Baudelaire, Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Allan Poe, 1857, in: Sur Edgar Poe, ed. MarieChristine Natta, Editions Complexe, Paris 1990, 171–172.

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nature was shattered, and, along with it, faith in the strength of man’s will and mind. In his final confession, written shortly before his foreseeable death, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll, a physician and alchemist like Mesmer, describes the result of his Romantic investigation into his own soul, his discovery of his own “profound duplicity of life” due to “man’s dual nature”;331 his experiment of separating the healing doctor and the destructive criminal within him fails as Dr Jekyll remains double and Mr Hyde purely evil, and both are doomed to die together. The doppelganger motif is projected into the novel’s diction – heaven and virtue create bondage and suffering; hell and vice entail pleasure and vitality. Thus, Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), with its debt to the Gothic novel tradition, is a profoundly sceptical narrative in the wake of Romantic Disillusionism. The Romantic paradox of tender love and violent war in Romanticism’s name-giving parade genre, the romance, is symptomatic of that duplicity.332 In Gothic novels as a modern type of romance, the saintly order of the visible world (symbolizing the conscious and the superego) is undermined and ultimately destroyed by the chaos of the subterranean world of confused passages and dungeons (symbolizing the unconscious and the id), the scene of violence, rape, and torture. Due to the rising awareness of man’s double and paradoxical nature, Romantic romance carries the germ of destruction in itself, and, deviating from romance tradition, usually ends in disillusionment and destruction. The conservatism of both Neoclassicists and Positive Romantics, it is true, soon endeavoured to overcome the awareness of such a split in man, aiming to reconcile it with traditional anthropology, like Goethe in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–1796) or Victor Hugo in Pr8face de Cromwell (1827). Two sides of the same coin – or the light and dark sides of a tortoise as described by Melville, or the fan-shaped, split leaves of a gingko biloba tree as envisaged by Goethe – could still allow for the integral nature of a medal, tortoise, or ginkgo leaf. The “Gegeneinanderbewegen” of the episodes and characters in the two parts of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (1795–1829) are meant to confirm, rather than preclude, an inner coherence of nature, much as Janus-faced Weimar Classicism aimed to unify the contradictions of Neoclassicism and Romanticism, the marriage of Faust of Germany and Helen of Troy, with Goethe trying to reconcile his loyalty to Duke Karl August with his admiration for Napoleon. Weimar, close to Jena, bridged the opposites of French Neoclassicism and early Jena Roman331 R.L. Stevenson, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), ed. Emma Letley, The World’s Classics, 1987, 1991, 60. For the influence of the Darwinian theory of evolution on the concept of man’s duality, due to his remaining animal nature, see Paul Goetsch, The Savage Within: Evolutionary Theory, Anthropology and the Unconscious in Fin-de-SiHcle Literature, in: AnneJulia Zwierlein (ed.), Unmapped Countries, London 2005, 95–106. 332 Labbe, The Romantic Paradox, 2–10.

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ticism, uniting elements of both philosophies and aesthetics.333 Goethe’s poem on a ginkgo leaf read nature like Emerson, interpreting the split yet integral nature of the leaf as symbolizing the split yet integral nature of the world, himself, and his poetry : Ist es Ein lebendig Wesen? Das sich in sich selbst getrennt, Sind es zwey? die sich erlesen, Daß man sie als eines kennt? Solche Frage zu erwiedern Fand ich wohl den rechten Sinn; Fühlst Du nicht an meinen Liedern Daß ich Eins und doppelt bin?334

The Weimar Classicist Goethe, however, fought for a lost cause. The awareness of man’s split nature that forbade such a reintegration, at least in this life, rapidly gained ground in art as well as in philosophy. By the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, only the most steadfast traditionalists could maintain their belief in a possible fusion of the divided self, not least due to the influence of Freudian psychoanalysis. In Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s drawing “How They Met Themselves” (1860) and in his poem “He and I” (1881) as well as in Thomas Hardy’s late lyric “He Follows Himself”, for instance, profoundly troubled characters and speakers meet their doppelgangers, seek to be reunited with them, and reach the disillusioning conclusion that such a healing process is impossible.335 The real doppelganger reaches for his ideal counterpart in vain, as does the young woman in Rossetti’s drawing of a pair of lovers and their doppelgangers. There is no chance of bridging the wide gap between the real and the ideal – Baudelaire’s “spleen” and “id8al” – not even by love, a force traditionally believed to be able to conquer all rifts. At the beginning of the century, the time of the rise of Romantic Disillusionism, the double nature of man was seen in and exemplified by Napoleon Bonaparte: advocate of the French Revolution and practitioner of ancien r8gime feudal hierarchy, empereur and citoyen, cruel and gallant, cultivated and boorish, enchanter and disillusioner, promulgator and demolisher of civilization. Three years after his death, Walter Scott wrote: “He was a strange mingled phantom of grandeur and terror, and a little meanness withal, as ever bestrode 333 Volker C. Dörr, Weimarer Klassik, Paderborn 2007, 47–50. The term “Weimarer Klassik” was coined in the nineteenth century to denote high quality, not a literary school. 334 Goethe, West-östlicher Divan, Gingo Biloba, 1819, in: Sämtliche Werke, ed. Hendrik Birus et al., 40 vols., Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1987–1999, III. 79. 335 Pauline Fletcher, Rossetti, Hardy and the “Hour Which Might Have Been”, in: Victorian Poetry, 20 (182), 6, and Felix Forster, Dante Gabriel Rossetti und der romantische Desillusionismus, 71–73.

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the destinies of the world […]”.336 In Byron’s and Grabbe’s view, Napoleon had intended to implement the ideals of the failed French Revolution but instead betrayed them to his self-destructive lust for power and new repressive empire. He had fallen victim to a double treason – both that of his allies and, worse, of his human nature, which would not heed the lessons of history. Unable to learn from Alexander and Caesar that certain Rubicons should not be passed, or from Charles XII of Sweden that a burning Moscow is a vain conquest, this intellectual was driven by a blind thirst for war and a paradoxical “impulse of the perverse” to betray his ideals and work only to his own destruction. Anticipating the pessimistic philosophies of Schopenhauer and Thomas Hardy, history is made with no aim or purpose – neither by dialectical self-deployment nor by human plans – but acts at random by a blind will immanent in nature that hurries its actors on without a logically consistent plan, including the mighty Napoleon.337 History is a product of the “Genius der Gattung”338 bluntly intent on the propagation of the species, and is hence a stomping ground for primitive, uncontrollable passions, like Byron’s battlefield of Bessarabia in Don Juan, Mary Shelley’s battleground of Greece in The Last Man (1826), or Thomas Hardy’s battlegrounds of Europe in his epic drama The Dynasts (1904–1908). Byron’s, Schopenhauer’s, and Hardy’s Napoleon, epitomizing the paradoxical nature of man, is a split character expressing uncontrollable passions and the blind will of history and the human species:339 Thou Rome, who saw’st thy Caesar’s deeds outdone! Alas! why past he too the Rubicon? The Rubicon of man’s awakened rights, To herd with vulgar kings and parasites?340

The antithetically mixed nature of man became such a widely accepted anthropological idea that even conservative poets chose Alexander the Great to illustrate this modern doctrine. In the year of the publication of the two first cantos of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812), Charles Caleb Colton, a Neoclassical satirist of Romanticism and supporter of William Gifford, characterized the Greek conqueror by contradictions typical of the Byronic hero: See the World’s Lord, the Puppet of a Punk, A God when sober ; less than mortal, drunk;

336 337 338 339 340

Edgar Johnson, Sir Walter Scott: The Great Unknown, London 1970, II. 867. Hardy, The Dynasts, 1904–1908, I. 223–224. Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, 1819–1844, II. 729 and passim. P. Neugebauer, Schopenhauer in England, Berlin 1932, 33–39. Byron, The Age of Bronze, lines 137–410.

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In fight brave, generous; cruel at the feast, In Egypt sage: at Babylon a beast.341

Much the same applies to Grillparzer’s tragic protagonist King Ottokar of Bohemia, whose dramatic portrayal echoed Alexander and Napoleon (1825). Ottokar’s reason and loyalty cannot stand the brunt of his activism and pride, a split in his nature that leads to his ultimate fall and death. His human constitution as well as history’s blind will prove to be his ruin – a variant upon the am\cjg of Greek tragedy, which is here evoked in a modern update of the Classical Tradition. Grillparzer was seemingly a Biedermeier moralist, yet was also an early secret admirer of Schopenhauer. Even for his first published play, Die Ahnfrau (1817), he chose a subversive historical drama, a Negative Romantic Schicksalstragödie, in which he secularized the classical concept of a divinely decreed fate into a brutal and unjust force inimical to and stronger than man. Antithetically mixed man cannot possibly attain any lasting success in a world ruled by a contingency that reminds us of a malicious and sadistic spirit rather than a benevolent god. Schicksalstragödie was variant kind of English Gothic tragedy. Die Ahnfrau features the cold-blooded and pitiless ghost of an adulterous ancestress long dead, a symbol of cruel fate. No benevolent god hears prayers for forgiveness. As in the later Theatre of the Absurd, there is no way out, neither geographically (out of the place of the action), historically (back to the ancien r8gime culture of the castle on the Rhine), nor soteriologically (by remorse and forgiveness). Old Earl Borotin’s once splendid Gothic castle, with its holy chapel, has a dark underside: ancestral crime. His children, Berta and Jaromir, are split in their characters. The ghost of the adulterous ancestress Berta is the virtuous Berta’s doppelganger, just as the virtuous and handsome lifesaver Jaromir also leads a band of robbers characterized by a dense, diabolical imagery (and possibly also the literary projection of the simultaneously loyalist and subversive Austrian civil servant Grillparzer himself). The angst-driven Jaromir thus sees the hall of Borotin Castle, in which he takes refuge from the king’s soldiers, as a mixture of heaven and hell in a world out of joint: Engel sah ich an der Schwelle Und die Hölle Hauset drin!342

Like Berta, Grillparzer’s women frequently alternate between innocence and corruption, sensibility and cruelty : Elga in his novella “Das Kloster bei Sendomir” (1827), Lukrezia in his tragedy Ein Bruderzwist in Habsburg (MS 1825– 1848), and Erny in his tragedy Ein treuer Diener seines Herrn (1830). Attempts at 341 Colton, Hypocrisy : A Satire in Three Books, Tiverton 1812, 116. 342 Grillparzer, Die Ahnfrau, 1817, beginning of act II, in: Werke, I. 32.

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reducing them to homogeneity, as the Byronic hero Starschensky’s one-dimensional misunderstanding of Elga as a virtuous distressed damsel in need of help, accelerate the unavoidable catastrophe. A split, contradictory historical hero that fascinated the Romantic Period was Cola di Rienzo – called Rienzi. A man of low origin and manners, he nevertheless befriended Petrarch, tried to restore the Roman republic, and rose to be Rome’s last plebeian tribune in Renaissance Italy. Rediscovered by the French Revolution as a friend of the people, Rienzi fascinated Byron, Bulwer-Lytton, the young Benjamin Disraeli, and the young Richard Wagner.343 Compassionate and cruel, boorish and erudite, arrogant and humble, courageous and timid, intelligent and foolhardy, Rienzi reminded the age of the irreconcilable excesses of the French revolutionaries themselves, including their originally noble aims and ultimately ignoble failure, ending in useless bloodshed and leaving their country in a worse condition than before. Unlike the American revolutions of George Washington and Simon Bolivar, which had been successful (at least initially and in part), the European revolutions had failed, merging into a deteriorated status quo ante. The Holy Alliance between Russia, Austria and Prussia that aimed to repress the civil rights of their peoples was not joined by Britain (except in the Regent’s function as sovereign of Hanover), but was supported by it in the even more powerful Quadruple Alliance. The Congress of Vienna was followed by the Congress of Verona, with the Italian city coming under Austrian rule. Europe was distributed according to princes’ claims and negotiations in demonstrative neglect of their various peoples’ cultures and interests. The driving force was neither aristocratic responsibility nor patriotic zeal but money borrowed to fund mercenaries’ actions in the expectation of greater gain, as in the introduction of the Corn Law after Napoleon’s defeat. It seemed that the war had been waged by the aristocracy and gentry to keep up prices and rents which, after the peace, had to be consolidated by new legislation that further impoverished the poor and hungry. The aristocracy and gentry were The last to bid the cry of warfare cease, The first to make a malady of peace. For what are all these country patriots born? To hunt, and vote, and raise the price of corn? […] The peace has made one general malcontent Of these high-market patriots; war was Rent!344

343 Elisabeth Frenzel, Stoffe der Weltliteratur, Rienzi, 672–674. 344 Byron, The Age of Bronze, lines 570–573 and 626–627.

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The Romantic dream of naturally grown, national, ethnic, free, peaceful states defended by true patriots had evaporated like an ignis fatuus of history. The War of Greek Independence, which had threatened to unite the Liberals and Radicals in a new vision of hope, was later supported by Europe’s monarchs for the most various aims (and finally channelled by the institution of a Greek King of German birth). Months before Prince Alexandros Mavrocordatos persuaded Byron to go to Greece, Byron had no hope of success; when he joined and died in the Greek War he acted as “the fool of passion”:345 But this is well: Greeks only should free Greece, Not the barbarian, with his mask of peace. How should the Autocrat of Bondage be The king of serfs, and set the nations free?346

In Byron’s view, history teaches not wiser actions but more and more disappointing experiences. Spain was freed from the Moorish yoke to be subjected to that of the Holy Inquisition.347 The circle repeated itself in Byron’s lifetime when Spain shook off the Napoleonic yoke to be subjected to the absolutistic tyranny of Fernando VII (1813–33). In his posthumously collected and published Pensieri, Leopardi generalized Byron’s views by distinguishing ancient from modern civilizations. Apart from a few exceptions (Pyrrho and the sceptic philosophers) ancient man, with his young civilization, took his wishful thinking and mythical illusions for realities and could thus feel a hilarious gioia (joy of life), whereas modern man, with his adult civilization, detected the illusions and thus replaced gioia with noia, Baudelaire’s ennui – a mixture of pain, boredom, and disgust of life.348 As in the lives of individuals growing up, illusions of innocence must yield to experience of destruction and death.349 In the modern, tragicomic, dramatic version of this tragic fact, Georg Büchner’s Prince Leonce of Popo is haunted by ennui, taedium vitae, Langeweile and Weltüberdruss, and is even refused the benefit of suicide, in the succession of Klingemann’s Nachtwachen and in anticipation of the Theatre of the Absurd. Human boredom, be it Leonce’s or Danton’s, thus reflects divine boredom, the ultimate motive of the Creator’s making of the universe.350 The world as experienced by Leonce, his beloved Princess Lena of Pipi, and his self-appointed court fool 345 346 347 348

Byron, What are to me … [Last Words on Greece], MS 1824, line 5, VII. 83. Byron, The Age of Bronze, lines 298–301. Ibid. lines 320–339. Leopardi, Pensieri di varia filosofia e di bella letteratura (“Zibaldone di pensieri”), posth. 1898–1907, in Tutte le opere, ed. Walter Binni, Florence 1969, II. 499 et passim. 349 For the negation of Blakean synthesis after “innocence” and “experience” see below. 350 See Valerio’s comment on the court preacher’s reference to the creation of the universe, in Büchner, Leonce und Lena, MS 1836–7, III/3, in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Paul Stapf, Tempel Klassiker, Berlin and Darmstadt 1959, 141.

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Valerio is deprived of all romantic and theological illusions, bathetically degraded to a cheap tavern with a gambling table symbolizing fatalism, indifference, contingency, and nature’s blind will. Prince Leonce is a fool whenever he dreams or believes that he has reached the ideal, and his fool Valerio is wise in telling him so, as when Leonce thinks to have found his princesse lointaine in Lena as Petrarch in Laura or Heinrich von Ofterdingen in Mathilde. In contrast to Shakespeare’s wise fools or the medieval Festum Stultorum, there is no world of aim and order that can, for a time, be comically or tragically perverted. In Valerio’s words: Die Sonne sieht aus wie ein Wirtshausschild, und die feurigen Wolken darüber wie die Aufschrift: ‘Wirtshaus zur goldenen Sonne’. Die Erde und das Wasser da unten sind wie ein Tisch, auf dem Wein verschüttet ist, und wir liegen darauf wie Spielkarten, mit denen Gott und der Teufel aus Langeweile eine Partie machen […]351

The image of the world as blind fate’s gambling board recurs again and again in Romantic Disillusionism, though not always with the same bitterness as life’s tavern may be a genial place, the pleasures of wine counteracting the pains of existence. Thus, in Edward Fitzgerald’s Rub#iy#t of Omar Khayy#m (1859), the English translator’s wise, old, twelfth-century astronomer-poet Om#r Khayy#m is a more philosophically minded, more consciously epicurean, and more willingly sceptical version of Büchner’s Valerio. Fitzgerald’s Omar Khayyam concentrates on the pleasures which doubt yields when the possible, though short-lived, joys of life are no longer marred by divine threats of hell and ascetic commands. In that perspective, the experienced and disillusioned old man can accept both destiny’s and death’s ultimate victory : While the Rose blows along the River Brink, Wit old Khayy#m the Ruby Vintage drink: And when the Angel with his darker Draught Draws up to thee – take that, and do not shrink. ’Tis all a Chequer-board of Night and Days Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays: Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays, And one by one back in the Closet lays.352 351 Ibid. 130. Cf. the jester Homunculus Mandrake’s comparison of the world to a tavern with the sign “The Fool”, in a revision of Beddoes, Death’s Jest-Book, 1829–1849, in: Plays and Poems, ed. H.W. Donner, London 1950, 333. For later attempts to justify romantic dreams and fantasies as dignified, human ways of dealing with a comically absurd creator’s comically absurd world see the works of G.K. Chesterton, especially his novel The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904). 352 Fitzgerald, Rub#iy#t of Omar Khayy#m, 1859, stanzas 48–49 (first edition), in: Selected Works, ed. Joanna Richardson, London 1962, 260.

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The adult awareness of nature’s cold indifference to and lack of sympathy with man’s absurd condition was a commonplace of Romantic Disillusionism, inverting the holiest (though shaken) creed of Positive Romanticism. When, later, the Decadent Romantic James Thomson distinguished himself from the affirmative Preromantic James Thomson, author of the nature poem The Seasons (1726–30), by adding the initials B. (for Percy Bysshe Shelley) and V. (for Vanolis, anagram of Novalis) to his name, he did so with ironic intent. Both Percy Shelley and Novalis, though different in political outlook, were Positive Romantics who believed in an ontological harmony of nature and man, and in the truth of the vision of a princesse lointaine symbolizing an integral world beyond. Thomson B.V., like Byron and Büchner, persistently denied such innate telepathy and metaphysical links, even in his earlier poems which had just begun to undermine the creed and conventions of Positive Romanticism. In Thomson’s The Doom of a City (1857), “Nature cares not for the ruin wide”, glowing in dreaming beauty on a scene of human misery and desolation.353 And, in his shocking The City of Dreadful Night (1874), one of the many unidentifiable and lonely voices in the world’s desert confirms this disillusion in terms reminiscent of Schopenhauer : ‘The world rolls round for ever like a mill; It grinds out death and life and good and ill; It has no purpose, heart or mind or will.’354

In “Tasso to Leonora” (1859), Thomson discredited Novalis’s and Percy Shelley’s princesse lointaine by creating a truly mad prisoner Tasso, a wild Platonist who mistakes the reality of his confined life in his dark cave for a mere shadow and show, and his vision of love for the only substantial truth. Thomson’s treatment of the familiar literary matter, the unfortunate Italian Renaissance poet Torquato Tasso’s forbidden love of his sovereign’s sister Leonora d’Este, turned Tasso into a mad Byronic character who knows that his role is fixed and his dreams are vain, but who cannot help dreaming and even raving about free will and final salvation. In Tasso’s Browningesque dramatic monologue, the final ecstasy of his belief in love’s redemption reveals Platonism as despairing man’s wishful thinking in a madhouse world. Leonora, Tasso’s princesse lointaine, is a noblewoman changed into a will-o’-the-wisp-like femme fatale, an alleged redemptress of man’s own construction, “das Ewig-Weibliche” which does not draw us heavenward but teases and tortures us into error and perdition: 353 Thomson B.V., The Doom of a City, The Judgment, 1856, III. 420–5, in: Poetical Works, ed. Bertram Dobbell, London 1895, II. 168. 354 Thomson B.V., The City of Dreadful Night, 1874, VIII. 36–38, I. 143. Note the subversive transformation of the mill, a commonplace of the Positive Romantic locus amoenus, into a symbol of senseless circularity and torture.

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Cling, cling fast to this dear faith, Rock of life in sea of death: Our mazed web of doom is wrought Under God’s directing thought. For were life no flitting dream, Were things truly what they seem, Were not all this World-scene vast But a shade in Time’s stream glass’d; Were the moods we now display Less phantasmal than the clay, In which our poor spirits clad Act this Vision, wild and sad, I must be mad, mad, – how mad!355

Anti-Platonism was the hallmark of the Negative Romantic subversion of a sustaining creed. There is thus neither true vision nor true anamnesis and, consequently, no possibility for the disillusioned adult to regain the lost paradise of his childhood. To the Positive Romantics, such as Blake, Wordsworth, and Percy Shelley, the childhood of men and nations – with their innate and sympathetic feeling of nature’s rhythms – was recoverable. Their primitivism saw a chance of, and even preached, regression and reorientation towards “noble savagery”; a more natural musicality, language, sensibility, and morality, as well as a more imaginative vision of the world. Lasting dejection and despair could be cured by recourse to memories of happier earlier days, when they were in unison with the regular changes of joy and sorrow, light and shade, sun and rain. Wordsworth in particular expressed this belief in the first part of his two-book Prelude (MS 1798), when he and Coleridge were in wintry German Goslar in a state of depression, as well as in “Tintern Abbey” (1798) and “My Heart Leaps Up” (MS 1802, 1807). Doubt of his Platonism, however, shows in the reduction of his confidence in a remembrance of childhood to a pious wish: “And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety”.356 Amelia Opie trusted the redemptive power of memory in her “Ode to Borrowdale in Cumberland” (MS 1794), when she suffered from lasting fears of arrest during Pitt’s campaign of persecution against Radicals. And on the Continent, Friedrich Schiller taught it more theoretically and coherently in his treatise Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (1795–1796). With Schiller, it is not only the beauty and 355 Thomson B.V., Tasso to Leonora, MS 1859, lines 321–332, ed. cit. II. 318–319. My own italics. 356 W. Wordsworth, My Heart Leaps Up, MS 26 March 1802, lines 8–9, in: Poetical Works, ed.cit. 62.

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rhythmicality of the phenomena of nature, but their innate symbolism pointing to original paradisiacal unity that fills us with nostalgia, inviting us to regain that natural Paradise – the desirable aim of all romantische Sehnsucht. The ideal lies in the lost past and is to be recovered some time in the future, the childhood of individuals and nations: Sie [die Naturerscheinungen und ihre Symbolik] sind, was wir waren; sie sind, was wir wieder werden sollen. Wir waren Natur wie sie, und unsere Kultur soll uns auf dem Wege der Vernunft und der Freiheit zur Natur zurückführen. Sie sind also zugleich Darstellung unserer verlorenen Kindheit, die uns ewig das Teuerste bleibt; daher sie uns mit einer gewissen Wehmut erfülllen. Zugleich sind sie Darstellungen unserer höchsten Vollendung im Ideale, daher sie uns in eine erhabene Rührung versetzen.357

In A Defence of Poetry (MS 1821), the last manifesto of Positive Romanticism, Percy Shelley sees the poet’s task as reminding adult man of the loss of his anamnetic “intimations of immortality”, admonishing him to return to nature’s rhythms and the innocence and visions of his childhood as Paradise Regained. Tieck, Byron, De Quincey, Clare, Mary Shelley, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Musset, Espronceda, Lenau, and Heine, however, repeatedly doubted, ridiculed, or disavowed this Platonic optimism. Their doubt was informed by the experience of a discontinuity of identity because a failure to recapture and relive the past, as later seen in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The House of Life (1870, 1881) and Marcel Proust’s f la recherch8 du temps perdu (1913–1927), made them aware of a radical change to their personalities. Inscribing himself upon Byron, John Clare, the mental asylum patient, assumes the persona of a Childe Harold, who often regresses to recapture scenes of childhood. The Wordsworthian yearning leaves him more disconsolate with the suspicion that childhood and youth were deceptive, with their illusions of paradise, including Clare’s frustrated yet never forgotten first love for Mary Joyce, whom, in the morbid illusions of his madness, he sought to revive from the grave: Dull must that being live who sees unmoved The scenes & objects that his childhood knew The school yard & the maid he early loved The sunny wall where long the old Elms grew The grass that e’en till noon retains the dew Beneath the wallnut shade I see them still Though not such fancys do I now pursue Yet still the picture turns my bosom chill & leaves a void – nor love nor hope may fill.358 357 Schiller, Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, in: Werke, ed. Paul Stapf, TempelKlassiker, Darmstadt 1964, II. 679. 358 Clare, Child Harold, MS ca 1840–1841, lines 603–611, in: Later Poems 1837–1864, ed. cit. I. 62. See also Burwick, Poetic Madness and the Romantic Imagination, 268.

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Tieck’s sentimental hero-poet William Lovell, lapsed into corruption and guilt, fails in his attempt to regenerate by recovering his golden childhood, with its illusions of innocence and universal harmony : Doch Entschwunden ist die Zeit, das eh’rne Alter Des Mannes trat in alle seine Rechte. Mich kennt kein zartes, kindliches Gefühl, Zerrissen alle Harmonie, das Chaos Verwirrter Zweifel streckt sich vor mir aus. Von jäher Felsenspitze schau ich schwindelnd In schwarze, wüste, wildzerrißne Klüfte.359

Nor can Musset’s Rolla recall the glad feelings of his childhood in the hour of his suicide, when he hears old songs from a band of street singers. On the contrary, they wound his heart even deeper with the realization that such illusions are irrecoverably lost.360 In the Byronic mode, Rolla (1833) creates fictions of paradise only in order to destroy them, as in when the narrator describes the beauty of the young lovers Rolla and Marie as modern, absurd descendants of Romeo and Juliet. Rolla is a twenty-year-old libertine, Marie a fifteen-year-old prostitute; but Marie is really representative of an Eve made sinful by poverty in a world characterized by promiscuous sex hidden under a cloak of respectability. After the Enlightenment had destroyed illusions and lies, Paradise Lost is the real condition of the world, the disillusioned antithesis to Paradise without the synthesis of Paradise Regained. Man’s dual nature never fully allowed the existence of a chaste Mary without the antithetical component of a lascivious Eve: Quinze ans! – l’.ge oF la femme, au jour de sa naissance, Sortit des mains de Dieu si blanche d’innocence, Si riche de beaut8, que son pHre immortel De ses phalanges d’or en fit l’.ge 8ternel? Oh! La fleur de l’Pden, pourquoi l’as-tu fan8e, Insouciante enfant, belle ðve aux blonds cheveux?361

Childhood is characterized by fictions and false impressions, not by prophetic visions. De Quincey’s children are antithetically mixed like his adults, forever projecting “a vast theatre of phantasmagorical figures moving forwards and backwards between their chamber walls”.362 De Quincey’s adult cannot recover his childhood either, because man’s past resembles a city sunk into the sea, a 359 360 361 362

Tieck, William Lovell, 1795–1796, ed. cit. 555. Musset, Rolla, 1833, 5. 8–13, in: Po8sies complHtes, 287. Ibid. 3. 119–124, ed. cit. 281. De Quincey, The Dark Interpreter, in: Posthumous Works, I. 7–8.

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museum without access.363 In many texts, his review of John Roscoe’s edition of the works of Pope (1848) or his Autobiographical Sketches (1853), De Quincey politely contradicted his old friend Wordsworth’s Platonic concept of the one life within us as symbolized by the rainbow. In Romantic Disillusionism, attempts at regression into childhood (and the past in general) appear as childish in the negative sense of unreal and immature. The heroes of Mary Shelley’s dystopic novel The Last Man (1826) dance and sing in their short-lived arcadia by Windsor Castle, blind to the ephemeral nature of their seemingly Regained Paradise: “Then we were gay as summer insects, playful as children […]”364 Landon, as usual, implies her scepticism in the way of female Biedermeier, rather than openly ridiculing restorative memory, when, in her poem “The Change”, her speaker laments an aged poet’s lost strength and beauty. As in Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the heart is broken long before the body, so that memory and the weak mind can restore nothing: The smile may come, the smile may go, The blush shine and depart; But farewell when their sense is quench’d Within the breaking heart. And such is thine: ’tis vain to seek The shades of past delight: Fling down the wreath, and break the lute; They mock our souls to-night.365

Byron’s tragic hero Jacopo Foscari, a prisoner subject to torture and facing death, steps from the darkness of a sinister room in the ducal palace of Venice into a shaft of light from the window and dreams of the illusory liberty of his “childish race” in a city which had never known freedom: “I was a boy then”.366 His “song of innocence”, a dream of strength and liberty, is painfully disavowed by his “experience”, the reality of his physical exhaustion. He must learn to be an adult incapable of recapturing the illusions of his childhood. This is the very contrary of Beethoven’s Positive Romantic opera Fidelio (1805–1814), where Florestan, in his prison, has a dreamy and ecstatic but truly heartening and invigorating vision of his lost wife Leonore in a shaft of light. He prophesies that she will save him, and she really succeeds in overthrowing the tyrant, restoring his liberty and earthly paradise of youthful love. Romantic Disillusionism doubted such implications of the reality of Paradise Lost and Regained, which 363 De Quincey, Suspiria de Profundis, 1845, in: Works, XV. 185–187. 364 M. Shelley, The Last Man, 1826, ed. Morton D. Paley, World’s Classics, Oxford 1994, 90. 365 Landon, The Vow of the Peacock and Other Poems, The Change, lines 29–36, London 1835, 279. 366 Byron, The Two Foscari, 1821, I/1, 96 and 121.

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organically linked a historically verifiable past with an equally certain future. Espronceda’s obituary poem to his love Teresa Mancha in El diablo mundo (1840) thus gives expression to the despair of recovering the lost, short-lived, and illusory happiness of earlier days, culminating in the pre-Baudelairean conviction that the dead body is all that remains and that nature is totally indifferent to individual human fate: “¡que haya un cad#ver m#s, qu8 importa al mundo!”367 Instead of finding consolation in emotions recollected in tranquillity, the speaker’s experience is one of increased pain and awareness of Paradise forever Lost: ¿Por qu8 volv8is a la memoria m&a, Tristes recuerdos del placer perdido, A aumentar la ansiedad y la agon&a De este desierto corazjn herido? ¡Ay! que de aquellas horas de alegr&a Le quedj al corazjn sjlo un gemido, ¡y el llanto que al dolor los ojos niegan, L#grimas son de hiel que el alma anegan!368

Past youth and love are just as dead and unrecoverable as past history, as incomprehensible as the present, and as unpredictable as the future; a mere syllabus deceptionum. Such well-known subversions of reintegrative Romantic memory and primitivism occur again and again, in various moods and styles, through Decadent and Fin-de-SiHcle literature to twentieth-century American mainstream realism.369 The modern, sceptical speaker of D.G. Rossetti’s poem “The Cloud Confines” (MS 1871), no longer able to see a coherence between heaven and earth, also doubts a Blakean bardic and esemplastic vision of “present, past, and future”:370 Our past is clean forgot, Our present is and is not, Our future’s a sealed seedplot, And what betwixt them are we?371

367 Espronceda, El Diablo mundo, Canto II: A Teresa, final line 352, in: Obras po8ticas, ed. J. Moreno Villa, Cl#sicos castellanos, Madrid 1942–1949, II. 68. The poem’s subtitle, Descansa en paz, ironizises Christian prayer and belief. For a more systematic study of Espronceda’s Byronism see Richard Cardwell, “El Lord Sublime”: Byron’s Legacy in Spain, in: The Reception of Byron in Europe, I. 149–160. 368 Espronceda, El Diablo mundo, lines 1–8. 369 As in J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories, A Perfect Day for Bananafish (1953). 370 Blake, Songs of Experience, Introduction, 1794, lines 1–2, in Complete Poems, 215. 371 D.G. Rossetti, The Cloud Confines, 1872, lines 53–56, in: Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. J.J. McGann, New Haven and London 2003, 236.

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The speaker of Rossetti’s favourite sonnet, “A Superscription” (1869, 1870, 1881), is reminded by Memory (also called Might-have-been, No-more, Too-late, Farewell) – a seductive yet evasive femme fatale, like the women of Rossetti’s portraits – that all he can remember are his guilt, missed chances, and failures. His pleasures are irretrievably lost, without a chance of Wordsworthian recapture. Hence it is actually an act of cruelty that Memory will not allow him to forget. The modern, sceptical speaker of Francis Thompson’s ode The Hound of Heaven (1893), insistently stalked by Christ, his obtrusive lover, tries all means of escape before yielding to his amorous pursuer. One of his attempts is regression to infancy in the company of children, but the regression is violently prevented by premature death: I turned me to them very wistfully ; But just as their young eyes grew sudden fair With dawning answers there, Their angel plucked them from me by the hair.372

Around the same year, Arthur Symons wrote poems contradicting Wordsworth on all levels, and particularly on memory, infancy, and regeneration. In “White Heliotrope” (MS 1893), the scent of the flower cannot reawaken a surfeited speaker’s “Forgotten memories of grace” on seeing his ageing paramour’s face in the mirror.373 “Nora on the Pavement” (MS 1893) features a lonely dancer at midnight, briefly escaping social constraints for a short burst of ecstasy and “blithe madness”, the very contrary of a Shelleyan regression into the natural rhythms of the child and savage.374 And Symons’s poem “In Bohemia” (MS 1892) describes the dilemma of a speaker who, following a nightly surfeit of sex and drink, hopes for regenerative morning and sunlight, only to find disillusionment: Draw back the blinds, put out the light! ’Tis morning, let the daylight come. God! how the women’s cheeks are white, And how the daylight strikes us dumb!375

There no longer appeared any way out of the misery and absurdity of the human condition, neither in forward nor backward orientation. Idealism seemed shattered on the rocks of historical experience, as did any system of philosophy 372 Thompson, The Hound of Heaven, lines 57–60, in: Poems, London 1946, 102. 373 Symons, London Nights, White Heliotrope, MS 20 June 1893, 1895, 1897, line 8, in: Collected Works, Poems, London: Martin Secker, 1924, I. 216. 374 Symons, London Nights, Nora on the Pavement, MS 22 August 1893, line 30, ed. cit. I. 174. 375 Symons, Silhouettes, In Bohemia, MS 17 January 1892, 1892, 1896, lines 13–16, ed. cit. I. 115.

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or history, clashing, moreover, with “unseren lebendigsten Lebensgefühlen”.376 In The Age of Bronze, Byron expressed all these late Romantic disillusions, chagrins, and grievances: the poem is defiant, though basically resignative by negating the meliorist purpose of classical satire and lacking hopes for a better future. Most Radicals of the earlier generation of Romantic poets had deserted their revolutionary banners and converted to conservatism: the Lake Poets, the Schlegels, Chateaubriand. Verona, with its proud arena and once a refuge for persecuted exiles, had just fallen back into applauding with her fettered hands the gaudy comedy of oppressors. Entropy seemed to be the natural law of history. Instead of a dialectical spiral turning upward (as in Hegel’s philosophy), history seemed to turn in an absurd circle (as in Byron’s own, Schopenhauer’s, and, later, Nietzsche’s philosophy). Thus, the Enlightenment had been invalidated by the Holy Alliance’s Trinitarian state theology, which shocked reason and abused the names of the American Congress and Senate: But who compose this Senate of the few That should redeem the many? Who renew This consecrated name, till now assigned To councils held to benefit mankind? Who now assemble at the holy call? The blest Alliance, which says three are all! An earthly Trinity! which wears the shape Of heaven’s, as man is mimicked by the ape. A pious unity! in purpose one – To melt three fools to a Napoleon.377

Instead of noble and unselfish leaders chosen by their peoples, the “Unholy Alliance” of 1815, a satirical variant of the originally ironic and derisive name of the “Holy Alliance”, was led by “three fools” who were an apt butt of Liberal and Radical satire: a foppish, ageing Russian tsar (Alexander I), a decadent Austrian emperor who was in fact the deposed and degraded emperor of the RomanGerman Empire (Franz I), and a timorous Prussian king (Friedrich Wilhelm III). The ensuing Quintuple Alliance of 1818 added two more “fools” to the number : a fat, gluttonous French king (Louis XVIII) and a fat, womanizing English king (George IV, irreverently called ‘Fum the Fouth’), the son and temporary princeregent of an “old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king”378 (George III, died 1820). Satires against these, as well as against their generals, statesmen, and apologists (Wellington, Ligne, Talleyrand, Canning, Liverpool, Castlereagh, 376 Heinrich Heine, Verschiedenartige Geschichtsauffassung, 1833, in: Sämtliche Schriften, V. 22. 377 Byron, The Age of Bronze, lines 390–399. 378 P.B. Shelley, England in 1819, line 1, in: Poetical Works, 574.

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Chateaubriand, Adam Müller etc), were legion – witness Percy Shelley’s bitter lines: I met Murder on the way – He had a mask like Castlereagh – Very smooth he looked, yet grim; Seven blood-hounds followed him.379

Byron, who, in parliament, was a Radical Whig380 and had experienced “fools” as an active member of the House of Lords (from 1809), joined in the mordantly disappointed chorus: Strange sight this Congress! destined to unite All that’s incongruous, all that’s opposite. I speak not of the Sovereigns – they’re alike, A common coin as ever mint could strike: But those who sway the puppets, pull the strings, Have more of motley than their heavy kings. Jews, authors, generals, charlatans combine, While Europe wonders at the vast design.381

It was in the easier satirical tone and form of his Don Juan, one unalloyed by romantic complaint, that Byron had written and published The Vision of Judgment (MS 1821, 1822), his mock eulogy on the death of King George III (1820). As a parody of the official obituary of the same title composed by Robert Southey, the former Radical who deserted to Toryism and was appointed poet laureate in 1813, it was an Augustan Menippean satire on literary “dunces” in the tradition of Dryden and Pope. The “chameleon” Byron was master of many styles, both Neoclassical and Romantic. The central aim of this mock-heroic satire in the tradition of Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead382 is the aforementioned grievance, only tangentially mentioned in The Age of Bronze, that a whole generation of Romantic poets, historians, and philosophers born shortly before or in the 1770s had abandoned their Radical cause, entropically falling back. Middling literary quality and misfortunes, such as the unauthorized publication of Southey’s Radical manuscript drama Wat Tyler in 1817, did no harm to the new commitment of these “renegades”. Shameless ideological treason and mercenary 379 Id., The Mask of Anarchy, MS 1819 (after the Peterloo Massacre), lines 5–8. Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, was foreign secretary from 1812 to his death by suicide in 1822. Under Prime Minister Lord Liverpool (1812–1827), he was senior British plenipotentiary at the Congress of Vienna. Also cf. Byron’s scornful epigrams on Castlereagh’s suicide, in: Complete Poetical Works, VI. 578. 380 M. Kelsall, Byron’s Politics, Brighton 1987. 381 Byron, The Age of Bronze, lines 706–713. 382 In accordance with the Neoclassical practice of Augustan Streitkultur ; see John Dryden, A Discourse concerning Satire, London 1693.

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falsification of history seemed the fashion of the age. While Satan, the accuser, and St Michael, the defender, plead for the possession of King George’s soul, Southey offers himself as a biographer to both, for cash, selecting and manipulating documents so as to make even Satan seem saintly in the Weslean fashion: He had written praises of a regicide; He had written praises of all kings whatever ; He had written for republics far and wide, And then against them bitterer than ever ; For pantisocracy he once had cried Aloud, a scheme less moral than ’twas clever; Then grew a hearty antijacobin – Had turn’d his coat – and would have turn’d his skin.383

The year of the king’s death, 1820, saw “freedom’s second dawn”,384 but this proved to be illusory as the first new, revolutionary movements after the Congress of Vienna (in Southern Europe, especially Byron’s Italy) were soon quelled. To Byron, the permanence of the reign of corrupt fools and dunces revealed itself in Southey’s foolish and dull poetical obituary of 1821, which nevertheless contributed to the sanctification of the deceased monarch and the continuation of his anti-freedom politics (as in the War of American Independence), with Lord Castlereagh as British foreign secretary. For all its Menippean burlesque, Byron’s Vision of Judgment leaves the reader with the serious impression that monarchs and politicians are more acted upon rather than acting; that conquest, bloodshed, and repression have always been the characteristics of history, and that these have worsened rather than improved. Moreover, it conveys the impression that the heavenly hierarchy, guarded by St Peter, is just as run down, outmoded, redundant, and ridiculous as its contemporary feudal counterpart in the anciens r8gimes below. The supervising angel, also to be understood as a heavenly governmental spy, is the only angel that has ever had real work to do, and is shown to have been overloaded with work, in spite of the fact that he has plucked all his quills to provide pens for himself and a whole board of saintly clerks and informers: This was a handsome board – at least for heaven; And yet they had even then enough to do, So many conquerors’ cars were daily driven, So many kingdoms fitted up anew ; Each day too slew its thousands six or seven, Till at the crowning carnage, Waterloo,

383 Byron, The Vision of Judgment, lines 769–776 (stanza 97). 384 Ibid. line 57.

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They threw their pens down in divine disgust – The page was so besmear’d with blood and dust.385

A tragic and elegiac rather than comic manifestation of Romantic Disillusionism appears in the poems of Nikolaus Lenau, an avid reader of Byron. Lenau’s favourite subject, autumn and autumnal depression, differs from Positive Romanticism’s symbolism of seasonal change. Where in Percy Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” (1820) the autumnal wind and winter’s frost are destroyers and preservers, natural and historical antithesis with the aim of rebirth and paradise regained as synthesis, Lenau’s autumn is mere stagnation, the lingering personal depression symbolizing history’s refusal of progress. Thus, his poem “Herbstgefühl” (1831) differs substantially both from Percy Shelley’s millennial expectations and Keats’s aesthetic enjoyment in the year’s decline. Shelley’s destroyer and preserver has become a spoiler and murderer, his inspiring and enlivening wind a spectral, withering, and fatal force opposed to human happiness. The incurably dejected speaker has no hope of recapturing his lost paradise: Mürrisch braust der Eichenwald, Aller Himmel ist umzogen, Und dem Wandrer, rauh und kalt, Kommt der Herbstwind nachgeflogen. Wie der Wind in Herbstes Zeit Mordend hinsaust in den Wäldern, Weht mir die Vergangenheit Von des Glückes Stoppelfeldern. An den Bäumen, welk und matt, Schwebt des Laubes letzte Neige, Niedertaumelnd Blatt für Blatt, Und verhüllt die Waldessteige; Immer dichter fällt es, will Mir den Reisepfad verderben, Daß ich lieber halte still, Gleich am Orte hier zu sterben.386

The suffering Romantic speaker’s confession is not only personal but was also following his experience of a rapid succession of baffled political hopes in the wake of the failed revolution of 1830 and his disappointment in Jacksonian 385 Ibid. lines 33–40 (stanza 5). 386 Lenau, Herbstgefühl, 1831, in: Werke und Briefe: Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Helmut Brandt et al., Vienna 1989–2004, I. 125.

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America in 1832, where he experienced liberty as a propagandistic illusion and found no escape from European repression. The expectation of paradise regained again proved fallacious: Drum ist die Erde ja ums Paradies betrogen, Daß ihre Luft ertönt von dunklen Monologen.387

Lenau’s disappointment with America resulted in his return to Europe. The illusion of paradise regained and the subsequent awareness of it being forever lost found expression in his jungle poems. “Der Maskenball” (1831) presents a speaker at a gay, old-world fancy-dress ball. Among the thoughtless, chaotic masquerade he is the only thoughtful person, one who, with the defeat of the liberal cause as expressed in the death of Poland, feels divided between the defenders of the ancien r8gime, Austria, Prussia, and Russia. Thus, the speaker’s mood is saddened at the sight of the mask of a Polish girl, and then elated at that of a pilgrim who makes him dream of an aim – the search for truth, nature, liberty, and paradise regained in the American jungle: Weihend mich mit stillem Beten Will den Urwald ich betreten, Wandeln will ich durch die Hallen, Wo die Schauer Gottes wallen; Wo in wunderbarer Pracht Himmelwärts die Bäume dringen, Brausend um die keusche Nacht Ihre Riesenarme schlingen.388

But the chaos of the ball anticipates the chaos of the jungle, and the visionary speaker’s Romantic longing for kind, free Wordsworthian nature is soon subverted by an imagery of its cruelty, with stifling creepers and the ferocious cries of animals of prey. In that jungle, the spirit of the universe will hardly answer his burning question “Warum Polen mußte sterben”.389 Emigration to an allegedly free country is no solution; the world of oppression proves inescapable. In Lenau’s later jungle poem, written after his return from America, Wordsworthian nature and Romantic paradise have altogether vanished, making way for a dense imagery of deceit, death, sterility, and horror. The disillusioned speakerpilgrim wanders on, instinctively (like his horse) and aimlessly driven by a blind will and brute life-force, into the uncertain darkness of death: Längst sind die Blüten und die Vögel fort, Nun ist der Wald verlassen und verdorrt. 387 Lenau, Täuschung, 1836, lines 22–3, II. 120. 388 Lenau, Der Maskenball, lines 98–105, I. 48. 389 Ibid. line 117.

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So sind vielleicht gar bald auch mir verblüht Die schönen Ahnungsblumen im Gemüt. […] Und auf den tief einsamen Waldeswegen Ritt ich getrost der nächsten Nacht entgegen, Und der geheimnisvollen Todesnacht.390

Another expression of Lenau’s disillusionment was his later poem (or rather collection of poems on the sufferings of) Die Albigenser (1842), with its despairing final song. The golden light of freedom would shine on in the minds of men, but proves to be a torturing will-o’-the-wisp: Woher der düstre Unmuth unsrer Zeit, Der Groll, die Eile, die Zerrissenheit? – Das Sterben in der Dämmerung ist schuld An dieser freudenarmen Ungeduld; Herb ist’s, das langersehnte Licht nicht schauen, Zu Grabe gehn in seinem Morgengrauen. Und müssen wir vor Tag zu Asche sinken, Mit heißen Wünschen, unvergoltnen Qualen, So wird doch in der Freiheit goldnen Strahlen Erinnerung an uns als Thräne blinken.391

The sun naturally rises in the course of nature, but its light never fully breaks because new religious sects and new secular tyrants obscure it with their own uniforms and banners in turn, every liberator becoming an oppressor himself in a circle of revenge over a previous crime. The poem’s disillusioned speaker, ever grasping for the new hope of a full sunrise, and trying hard to believe in a Hegelian philosophy of history, ironically discredits that hope himself: Das Licht vom Himmel läßt sich nicht versprengen, Noch läßt der Sonnenaufgang sich verhängen Mit Pupurmänteln oder dunklen Kutten; Den Albigensern folgen die Hussiten Und zahlen blutig heim, was jene litten; Nach Huß und Ziska kommen Luther, Hutten, Die dreißig Jahre, die Cevennenstreiter. Die Stürmer der Bastille, und so weiter.392

The gulf between Positive and Negative Romanticism with regard to a belief in and doubt or denial of history’s dialectic and man’s final destination should, 390 Lenau, Der Urwald, lines 42–45, 71–3, II. 54. 391 Lenau, Die Albigenser, Schlußgesang, lines 3451–3460, IV. 274. 392 Ibid. lines 3469–3476. For the speaker’s doubt about Hegel see Hartmut Steinecke, Nikolaus Lenau, in: Deutsche Dichter des 19. Jahrhunderts, ed. Benno von Wiese, 1969, Berlin 1979, 413.

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however, not mislead us into denying Romantic Disillusionism the status of Romanticism. Byron and others shared the concept of poetry as spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; the lava of the imagination, passion, ecstasy, and estro.393 In his Defence of Poetry, Percy Shelley advocates a return to original, primordial instincts, rhythms, and dances as opposed to artificial, superimposed forms and scansions as practised in Neoclassicism. His poetical meditation Mont Blanc (1817) adds to this the faith in and imagery of powerful inspiration from above, compared to avalanches fertilizing the earth. Byron, Beddoes, Poe, Leopardi, Baudelaire, Hardy, and Nietzsche, however, denied these Wordsworthian “spots of time” their transcendental dimension, viewing them as mere earthly whims and impulses from the unconscious, as trains of thought impelled by natural symbols (as later with the Symbolists), or even as immanent contingencies – times when poets were able to activate their powers of composition from a fund of reading. In his poetological sonnet entitled “Thoughts”, Beddoes replaced Shelley’s mighty storms and avalanches with their metaphysical signification by minimal phenomena that initiate the poet’s associations and entrance him in a pre-Decadent way : a ray of starlight peeping through clouds at night, incense trailing from a thurible ever swinging to and fro, a thin mist rising from a cowslip and dissolving itself in a gale, the whispering of soft winds, and the fine glitter of “cobweb-limbed ephemerae”.394 All of Hardy’s numerous poems dealing with composition and inspiration altogether reject the classical myth or theology of inspiration, Apollo and the Muses or the Weltgeist, and replace it with the technique described in Poe’s The Philosophy of Composition (1846).395 In Nietzsche’s aesthetics “das Dionysische” is the truth of nature and the origin of all art, but such an ebullient, violent, chaotic crater producing music and poetry (comparable to Shelley’s overpowering avalanche) cannot produce art without form, “das Apollinische”. Such form should not, however, stifle the crater and make the lava stiff and cold (as did Euripides in his rationalization and domestication of the early Attic tragedy with its Dionysian chorus). Beyond this agreement, the difference between Positive and Negative Romanticism arose over Plato. The Platonic jakoj!cah_a, joining truth and beauty in Positive Romanticism,396 is denied when Nietzsche identifies “das Dionysische” with truth and reality and “das Apollinische” with beauty and appearance. Their opposition and conflict is productive, but eternally irreconcilable. Dionysian music forever battling against Apollonian form and order is 393 Documented by Ren8 Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, II. 123 and 384. 394 Beddoes, Thoughts, line 11, in: Selected Poetry, ed. cit. 5. 395 Paul Goetsch, Thomas Hardy’s Poems on Composition and Inspiration, in: Motifs and Themes in Modern British and American Poetry, Trier 2013, 211–230. 396 For John Keats’s formulation of this nexus in the conclusion of his Ode on a Grecian Urn (1819) see chapters below.

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the origin and spirit of Aeschylean tragedy, as in Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik, oder, Griechentum und Pessimismus (1872). Here, the construction of the Classical Tradition differs radically from that of the Augustan Neoclassicists. In Nietzsche’s Romantic Disillusionism radicalized into a vitalistic nihilism, tragedy is the human condition per se. Progress through science and a rational explanation of myths is man’s greatest self-delusion (much as in the thought of Nietzsche’s favourite Romantic sceptic, Byron). What fascinated Nietzsche in Byron’s Don Juan was the aimless chaos of its erratic narration, the Dionysian turmoil artistically tamed but unstifled by an imposition of Apollonian order. It is in the Promethean acceptance of eternal life’s irredeemable chaos and tragic violence that life is transformed into art and the artist grows to become one with the emotionally involved actor, reader, or spectator. Art is thus the new religion of a modern theodicy, the last stronghold of metaphysics in a godless world: […] denn nur als ästhetisches Phänomen ist das Dasein und die Welt ewig gerechtfertigt […]397

397 Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik, 1872, III. I. 43. Note P.B. Shelley’s and Nietzsche’s common recurrence to the Romantic ordering of the sister arts, ut musica poesis instead of Horace’s ut pictura poesis.

I

Romantic Disillusionism

Romantic Disillusionism, or Negative Romanticism, is not only a late and reductionist phase of what we have agreed to call the Romantic Movement. In a way, it complements Romantic Platonism or Positive Romanticism. The term was originally coined by Morse Peckham in his seminal and controversial article “Toward a Theory of Romanticism”.398 Trying to reconcile Arthur Oncken Lovejoy’s and Ren8 Wellek’s definitions of Romanticism, Peckham distinguished such “positive romanticism” from the special case of the “negative romanticism” of Lord Byron: Negative romanticism is a necessary complement to positive romanticism, not a parallel or alternative to it, with which it must be reconciled. Briefly, negative romanticism is the expression of the attitudes, the feelings, and the ideas of a man [like Byron] who has left static mechanism but has not yet arrived at a reintegration of his thought and art in terms of organic dynamicism.399

Peckham saw “negative romanticism”, named after the “Everlasting No” in Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833–1834), as caused by the difficult transition from a static to an organic, dynamic, and diversified view of the universe in the eighteenth century, described in Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being (1936): This is negative romanticism, the preliminary to positive romanticism, the period of Sturm und Drang. […] The typical symbols of negative romanticism are individuals who are filled with guilt, despair, and cosmic and social alienation. […] They are Harolds, they are Manfreds, they are Cains. […] Byron spent his life in the situation of Wordsworth after the rejection of Godwin and before his move to Racedown and

398 In: PMLA, 66 (1951), 5–23, and Studies in Romanticism, 1 (1961), 1–8. Reprinted in: Romanticism: Points of View, ed. Robert F. Gleckner – Gerald E. Enscoe, Detroit MI 1962 and 1975, 231–257. 399 Ibid. 241.

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Nether Stowey, of the Mariner alone on the wide, wide sea, of Teufelsdröckh subject to the Everlasting No and wandering through the Centre of Indifference.400

From another, materialist point of view, Peckham’s distinction was supplemented by Jerome John McGann’s study The Romantic Ideology (1983). In a post-Marxist context, ideology means idealism, false consciousness. According to McGann, the Positive Romantics sought to escape the real world through imagination and poetry, and their modern interpreters perpetuate their error by reading them through their self-fashioning. McGann thus posits the countering figure of Byron (together with Heine) against the Romantic Platonists, assessing him, “the single and most important figure in the history of European Romanticism”, and editing his poetical works in the Clarendon Press (1980– 1993).401 Neoclassical and Pyrrhonian reproaches of escapism raised against the Positive Romantic poets, and the occasional admittance of escapism and idealizing falsification in the Romantic Irony of such works as Friedrich Rückert’s Amaryllis (MS 1812–1813, 1825), might well serve to support his view. Though criticizing L.J. Swingle’s concept of Romantic poetry as unhistorical, McGann in principle agrees with him that, in its mental theatre, Romantic poetry was profoundly dramatic rather that static, moving on a large scale that staged an ever-undecided conflict between visions and wakings, romance and reality, dreams and disillusions, positive and negative outlooks, affirmation and doubt, gioia and noia, Plato and Pyrrho.402 Peckham’s psychological explanation and definition and McGann’s materialist re-evaluation are one-sided, but have proved groundbreaking in studies of Romanticism. Pure idealism was no longer possible; doubt had accompanied Preromantic reformist thought from the very beginning. Pre-revolutionary Sturm-und-Drang confidence in the downfall of the rational tyranny of the ancien r8gime was tempered by doubt. From the beginning, Romantic Scepticism had been the reverse of Positive Romanticism, irrespective of its ever inherent doubt, and that Scepticism increased and grew to despair in the postrevolutionary European Napoleonic era, even more so after the Congress of Vienna. Klingemann and his Kreuzgang, Senancour and his Oberman, Byron and his Byronic heroes radicalized the doubt which had accompanied the birth of Romanticism and survived in such poems as Coleridge’s “Christabel” and “Kubla Khan” (both MSS 1798, publ. 1816 at the insistence of Byron). The failure of so many noble pre-revolutionary heroes and heroines was no longer under400 Ibid. 246–247. 401 McGann, The Romantic Ideology, Chicago IL and London 1983, 18, 27. See also Seamus Perry, Romanticism: The Brief History of a Concept, in: Duncan Wu (ed.), A Companion to Romanticism, 8. 402 McGann, ibid. 59–71.

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stood as a call to overthrow the ancien r8gime, but as a tragic manifestation of its pertinacity and invincibility : Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe, Rousseau’s Julie and St Preux, Goethe’s Werther, Schiller’s Don Carlos, Mackenzie’s Harley and Julia. Negative Romanticism may thus be defined as the result of the ever-present and increasing scepticism and uncertainty, the ultimately lost faith of the romantiques d8froqu8s, would-be believers and must-be realists. As true Romantics, John Keats and Karoline von Günderrode, for instance, both regretted the de-mystification of the world as seen in the rational analysis of the rainbow, but Keats still read it as a symbol of ultimate unity and the possible return to a better world beyond.403 By contrast, Karoline von Günderrode, with her failed expectations of marital happiness and political justice including equal rights for women that resulted in her suicide in 1806, envisaged such de-mystification as the ultimate disillusionment and impoverishment, an irreparable fall from innocence to experience: Doch alles ist ganz anders nun geworden, Der Himmel ist gestürzt, der Abgrund ausgefüllt, Und mit Vernunft bedeckt, und sehr bequem zum gehen. Des Glaubens Höhen sind nun demolieret, Und auf der flachen Erde schreitet der Verstand, Und misset alles aus, nach Klafter und nach Schuhen.404

The end of Mary Shelley’s novella Matilda (MS 1819), written in the wake of the loss of her infant son William in Italy, has a long dialogue between the Platonic meliorist Woodville, a poet of sensibility who is the titular heroine’s friend and spiritual adviser, and the sceptical Matilda herself. What maintains Woodville after the loss of his young wife – his very personal expulsion from illusions of Paradise – is his forced belief in an aim and purpose of this fallen world: Paradise Regained. What, by contrast, makes Matilda long for death and paves the way for her suicide in a negative version of eros kai thanatos (“the luxury of death”)405 is her assumption of an absurdly circular and aimless history of the world and its inhabitants; an ultimate death and a non-personal, non-spiritual resurrection of the decayed body in new material life: “[…] everteeming Nature will create another and another and another, and thou wilt lose nought by my destruction”.406 Having suffered a heavier loss through the suicide of her father, who had 403 Keats, Lamia, 1820, II. 229–238, in: Poems, ed. Miriam Allott, Longman Annotated English Poets, London 1970, 645–646. 404 Günderrode, Nachlass, Vorzeit und neue Zeit, MS ca 1799–1802, lines 5–10, in: Sämtliche Werke und ausgewählte Studien, I. 375. 405 Mary Shelley, Matilda, MS 1819–1820, in: Novels and Selected Works, ed. Pamela Clemit et al., Pickering Masters, London 1996, II. 58. 406 Ibid. II. 65.

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incestuously fallen in love with her, and feeling guilty without personal guilt, as befitting the victim of necessity and a tragic fate, she cannot adopt Woodville’s dialectical Platonism. He works on her like an anodyne, the laudanum that she has by her side, again and again elevating her with his tender instructions, only to throw her back into her despair when the narcotic effect of his sermonizing is over : “But this was only a momentary relief and my old habits of feeling returned […]”.407 Thus, Matilda is the contrary of her namesake in Dante’s “Purgatorio”, leading to death and Paradise Lost rather than “Paradiso”.408 And Woodville’s failure to break through the absurd circles of Matilda’s Byronic repetitions of the Fall of man reveals Mary Shelley’s adoption of Matilda’s Romantic Pyrrhonism over against Woodville’s ineffective Romantic Platonism. A related iconoclastic interpretation of the biblical myth of the Fall recurs in Emily Bront[’s neopagan Gothic novel Wuthering Heights (1847), one inspired by Byron, where Catherine tells the pious Nelly Dean her dream of her expulsion from Heaven. Heaven is not Catherine’s home any more than it is that of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Blessed Damozel (MS in the same year 1847), and both long to return to the imperfect earth, with its forbidden and dangerous, yet ecstatic and natural, loves. Whenever she dreamed of conversion and salvation, the angels expelled Catherine (and Emily Bront[ herself), flinging her back to the “middle of the heath” where she “woke sobbing for joy”.409 Acceptance of the inescapable human condition of godforsakenness and a burial in the heath in graves covered by bilberry plants and peat mould is better than the pious lie of Paradise Regained. These Negative Romantics, Romantic Pyrrhonists, or Romantic Disillusionists could no longer have faith in a purposefully ordered universe and a dialectical completion of individual or universal history. The unfulfilled promise of equal men and equal rights in the American Revolution was succeeded by the unfulfilled promise of libert8, 8galit8, fraternit8 in the French Revolution, one all the more shocking for its lapse into the very perversion of human rights and human dignity that prompted it. Thomas Moore, for instance, castigated the failure of the ideals of the American Revolution in his Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems (1806) as well as in a pair of formal Juvenalian satires, Corruption and Intolerance (1808), chiefly written against the harsh treatment of his native Ireland by the British Government.410 The Irishman fighting for independence from Britain had experienced the disillusioning results of the American Revo407 Ibid. II. 60. 408 Ibid. II. 62. 409 E. Bront[, Wuthering Heights, 1847, chapter 9, ed. Philip Henderson, Everyman’s Library 1907, 1966, 68. See Stevie Davies, Emily Bront[: Heretic, London 1994, 156. 410 British Satire 1785–1840, ed. John Strachan et al., London: Pickering & Chatto 2003, V. 1– 45.

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lution during his extensive travels in the United States in the years 1803–1804 after leaving his post as admiralty registrar on the British Bermudas. William Godwin, to take another example, created his pre-Byronic hero Bethlem Gabor when his faith in millenarianism was shaken by the failure of the French Revolution in 1799, turning him from rational Radicalism to imaginative Romanticism. Anticipating Byron’s Conrad the Corsair or Alp the Cenegade, Bethlem Gabor, the Gothic villain of Godwin’s first Romantic and historical novel St Leon (1799), is a cosmic rebel against an unjust creation and a political rebel against the sixteenth-century Hungarian ancien r8gime which has destroyed both his family and his original goodness. He is both a criminal rebel in his “fierce defiance of eternal Providence”411 and a pitiable man “withered by his own calamities”,412 like Frankenstein’s Monster made evil by things as they are. And Godwin’s titular hero, St Leon, is also corrupted by disillusionment surrounding the failure of his pantisocracy, the irreparability of human nature (including his own), and the treason of those whom he wants to help free from feudalism. Godwin’s American admirer, Charles Brockden Brown, evidently shared his disillusionment, especially in view of the failure of the proclaimed ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity in his young American Republic. Carwin and Ludloe, the villains of his first novels Wieland, or, The Transformation (1798) and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist (1803–1805), were made evil by irreparable genetic and social inequality, by man’s irresistible thirst for power and wealth, and by ineradicable religious fanaticism. Carwin, with his non-egalitarian gift of biloquism, is corrupted by the English aristocrat Ludloe, who abuses Godwin’s philosophy and Carwin’s ventriloquism to enlarge his fortune and possessions. The use of the term “biloquism” for “ventriloquism” denotes the good and the evil sides of Carwin’s human nature, underscored by the fact that Carwin has a dark Romantic doppelganger in Ludloe, the rich and ruthless aristocrat, who fixes on him and follows him like an evil shadow. Romantic Platonism, which Romantic Disillusionism undermined and overcame, had indeed been a result of the most important eighteenth-century change of paradigms. The traditional theistic concept of natura naturata, a rationally planned and created universe ordered in a “great chain of being”, functioning with the precision of a machine according to eternal laws, faded out. It was gradually replaced by the new, Romantic concept of natura naturans, whose organicism, dynamicism, and diversitarianism demanded an aim both in natural and historical growth for it to be integrated into the old theistic faith. Platonism and Christianity shared a melioristic belief in dialectical completion. In the Eucharist, the grain and the grape (thesis) has to be crushed (antithesis) to 411 Godwin, Travels of St Leon, 1799, ed. Pamela Clemit, World’s Classics, Oxford 1994, 397. 412 Ibid. 446.

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be transformed into a higher being, bread and wine, symbols or incorporations of Christ’s saving flesh and blood (synthesis). In the Old Testament, Jacob has to be maimed to become Israel, and the Jews had to suffer persecution and oppression to be purified and brought back to their God. In the New Testament, Christ had to die a vicarious death to save mankind. Platonism had the advantage that it outdid Judaeo-Christian soteriology in claiming a universal dialectical development, one that met the integrative and holistic Romantic fascination with Universalgeschichte and Universalreligion. However, it had the disadvantage of mystic foundationalism, corroded by doubt after the Enlightenment’s rational epistemology. Romantic Platonism was connected to the Romantic “interfusion experience” in conscious opposition to the Enlightenment’s cult of reason and rational division. The “esemplastic” imagination could reunite what the tyranny of reason had divided: this world and that beyond, reality and dream, appearance and reality, human and non-human life, good and evil, beauty and deformity, Heaven and Hell. William Blake’s belief that this mortal world of appearances and divisions was a fragment of the one eternal, spiritual world beyond – and that historical necessity would lead it back home to eternity –, syncretized Platonism, Hinduism, and Gnostic Christianity. An evil, rational, boundary-creating spirit, the Gnostic Demiurge whom Blake mythopoetically called Urizen and equated with Jehovah and Jupiter, had split time from eternity, place from ubiquity, and identity from universality. The first stage of the Fall of man was Paradise, paq\deisor, “enclosed” in place and limited to a thousand years. The second was the state of expulsion from Paradise, William Godwin’s “things as they are”, the ancien r8gime with its feudal order, property, established churches, legal codes, and legal prerogatives additionally vilified by the Industrial Revolution. Blake saw the dialectical return of this fallen nature as a historical necessity that would soon restore a paradisiacal millennium and then, after the lapse of a thousand years, lead the visible, divided, limited world back into the invisible, holistic, and eternal. To that view, !postas_a (defection from the primordial condition) would be followed by !pojat\stasir (restoration of the primordial condition). To see this and keep the mind aware of its divine origin was the Romantic prophet-poet’s and priest-poet’s mission to a people threatened with blindness by the increase of materialism. His redemptive imagination remembered and anticipated salvation as reintegration – unity regained, just as Samuel Taylor Coleridge declared that the perfect poem is inspired by “that ultimate end of human Thought, and human Feeling, Unity”,413 and Wordsworth praised Coleridge because to him “unblinded by these outward shows, The unity of all has 413 From Coleridge, Biographia Literaria and Notebooks; quoted and discussed in Seamus Perry, Coleridge and the Uses of Division, Oxford 1999, 19–24.

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been reveal’d”.414 Wordsworth’s Intimations Ode hailed rational, adult doubt as an unavoidable and necessary antithesis to natural, childish belief because its “obstinate questionings” and “blank misgivings” lead to a higher belief in “years that bring the philosophic mind”.415 Blake saw such dialectic revealed in many world myths, which he understood as fallen man’s reminiscence (anamnesis) of eternal truth, differing in cultural imaginations but concurring in philosophical doctrine. He thus fused biblical with non-biblical myths and enriched them with the imaginative myths of his own anamnesis: the circuitous journey of Ulysses, Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, Proserpine’s descent into the underworld and resurrection in spring, Prometheus’s suffering and unbinding, the old phoenix arising young out of his ashes, Jonah’s shipwreck and salvation out of the whale’s mouth, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, etc. What distinguished this universalist understanding of myths from Christian orthodoxy was their ranging on the same level. When Christianity joined, and became part of, the originally pagan Classical Tradition there were no longer various degrees of soteriological truth as in Christian typology, as when a heathen myth foreshadowed an Old Testament event or prophecy, which again foreshadowed New Testament history of salvation. Like Blake, the celebrated Romantic poet Mary Tighe did not distinguish between pagan and Christian myth, keeping the universal validity of the truth of all myth in mind. In her much-praised allegorical verse tale Psyche (1805), for instance, she freely reinvented the myth of Amor and Psyche, as told by Apuleius in his Metamorphoses (or Golden Ass) that she could read in self-taught Latin, with repeated references to Ulysses.416 Like Ulysses, Psyche is sent on a circuitous journey from Love via Vanity, Flattery, Credulity, Jealousy and Indifference to a higher kind of Love. The happy marriage of Psyche and Amor, however, which concludes the epic poem, is undercut both by Tighe’s references to her own life’s hardships and by her farewell stanza, so that here, again, Positive Romanticism is eroded by an element of doubt.417 With her experience of a lover and husband lost, Mary Shelley referred to the myth in her poem “Oh, come to me in dreams, my love!” (1839) – the distant lover will not visit the speaker except in vanishing dreams and “visions of the night”, recalling Amor fated to desert Psyche when she beheld him near : 414 Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1805–1806, II. 225–226, in: Complete Works, 54. 415 Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, MS 1802– 1804, 1807, lines 142, 145, 188, in: Poetical Works, ed. cit. 461–462. For the Romantic Irony in Wordsworth’s and Blake’s Platonic-Gnostic idealization of childhood see Roderick McGillis, Irony and Performance: The Romantic Child, in: Adrienne E. Gavin (ed.), The Child in British Literature, Basingstoke 2012, 101–115. 416 Duncan Wu (ed.), Romantic Women Poets: An Anthology, Oxford 1997, 372. 417 John M. Anderson, Mary Tighe, Psyche, in Duncan Wu (ed.), A Companion to Romanticism, 201–202.

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’Twas thus, as ancient fables tell, Love visited a Grecian maid, Till she disturbed the sacred spell, And woke to find her hopes betrayed.418

It was the anamnetic truth of classical myths of salvation that Tieck, Byron, Mary Shelley, Heine, Lermontov, and other Negative Romantics refused to believe in, discrediting them with classical myths of failure and through confrontation with historical or everyday experience, “things allowed, Averr’d, and known, – and daily, hourly seen.”419 To those anti-Platonists, the fragmentation and disparity of what Wordsworth called “outward shows” were the world’s insurmountable condition, and all dreams of unity the result of man’s wishful thinking. Tieck’s William Lovell experiences dream memories and metaphysical visions as a result of intoxication by wine, so that he distrusts his own ecstatically prophetic poem: O Wein! Du herrliche Gabe des Himmels! fließt nicht mit dir ein Göttergefühl durch alle unsre Adern? […] Ha! Welche Wesen sind es, die das Tor Der dunklen Ahndungen entriegeln? Was hebt den Geist auf goldbeschwingten Flügeln Zum sternbesäten Himmelplan empor?420

Byron bathetically rhymed “Plato” with “potato”,421 deflating all visions of a higher and better world, and Heine wrote Ideen: Das Buch Le Grand (1827) for the central purpose of reducing all idealism (represented by the Grand Napoleon’s dreams of lasting greatness) to reality (as represented by Napoleon’s French tambour-major Le Grand quartered in the house of the nine-year-old Heine’s parents in Düsseldorf, and his own schoolboy translation of “Glaube” by “cr8dit” instead of “religion”).422 The dream of a society constituted by libert8, 8galit8, fraternit8, one that was strong in 1806 when the French occupied Düsseldorf, would soon be shattered. Furthermore, he sarcastically preferred the numerous naked and lusty gods of the Classical Tradition to the modern trinitarian or monotheistic pantheon (“unserer neurömischen Dreigötterei oder […] 418 M. Shelley, “Oh, come to me in dreams, my love!”, lines 5–8, in: The Keepsake for MDCCCXXXIX (15 December 1839). The distant lover in the vision may be Mary Shelley’s tragically deceased husband Percy Shelley. 419 Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 4. 95.2–3. McGann, Byron and Romanticism, passim, argues that Byron’s unmasking of the mendacity of the Romantic imagination and the spuriousness of the Romantic sensibility (especially Charlotte Dacre and Della Cruscan poetry) contributed to satanize him as the highest-ranking European arch-enemy of the European establishment. 420 Tieck, William Lovell, 1795–1796, ed. cit. 231–232. 421 Byron, Don Juan, 7. 4. 2 and 4. 422 Heine, Ideen: Das Buch Le Grand, 1837, in: Sämtliche Schriften, II. 270.

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unserem jüdischen Eingötzentum”).423 In his verse tale Mtsiri (1840), Lermontov told of the vain search for a terrestrial paradise – let alone a heavenly one – via the unrepentant confession of a young novice to an old monk, modelled on Byron’s Manfred. A Cherkessian boy, one kidnapped from his Caucasian tribe by Russian oppressors and raised in a Georgian monastery like a bird in a cage, elopes in order to regain the imagined paradise of his homeland. However, unlike Ulysses on his circuitous journey, his heroic efforts and sufferings are vain, only serving to take him back to his monastic prison, just as his people’s heroic fight for liberty fails. Unlike other literary Circassians, nature does not receive and reintegrate him after his unnatural education and confinement.424 Young and disillusioned, he accepts his premature death and the fact that his return to a free homeland has proved to be a mere dream, like the imagined Caucasian paradise itself, the more so as his paradise is in plain truth a region of war and warriors. He is the spokesman of his author’s fatalism: In vain I argued with my fate: She mocked me with a hollow bait!425 In vain My heart is brimful with desire And longing. ’t is an idle fire!426

Almost two decades later in Les fleurs du mal (1857) Baudelaire used Byron’s technique of disillusionment by deflating and baffling all expectations of Paradise Regained, and, in Les paradis artificiels (1860), he followed the models of Thomas De Quincey and Edgar Allan Poe by substituting the artificial paradises of alcohol, drugs, and prostitutes for a non-existent natural paradise.427 Paradise is degraded to a drug and anodyne, numbing any sense of disappointed hope and helping to overcome the sense of forlornness and ennui temporarily. In the succession of Poe and Baudelaire, the sixteen-year-old Arthur Rimbaud wrote “Le bateau ivre” (MS 1871), a poem composed so as to broker an introduction to the older Paul Verlaine, who then became his lover in three years of ecstatic homoerotic passion that spurned all bourgeois conventions. Whether Rimbaud composed the poem under the influence of drugs or the impact of his poetological vision as expressed in his “Lettres du voyant” is a matter of debate. 423 Ibid. 424 Katya Hokanson, The Geography of Russian Romantic Prose, in: The Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism, 540. 425 Lermontov, =glaY, 1840, in: Mtsiri and Other Selected Poems, transl. Vaxtang Eristavi et al., Boonville MO 2004, 45. The title is the Georgian name for a novice, Lermontov’s disillusioned Byronic hero doomed to die without a name. 426 Ibid. 49. 427 Kupfer, Die künstlichen Paradiese, 588.

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Rimbaud’s synaesthesia, his confusion of all sense perceptions expressed in his accumulated illogical metaphors, served the purpose of ecstatically transcending the reality of a trading world, quite contrary to Keats’s synaesthesia, which aimed to reintegrate in a Platonic sense. The poem’s speaker, the drunken boat, longs for new experiences, only to be flung back from intoxicated elation into disillusion and depression, reminiscent of the final stanzas of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. The illusion of Paradise Regained is drowned in the sea of death: Mais, vrai, j’ai trop pleur8! Les Aubes sont navrantes, Toute lune est atroce et tout soleil amer : L’.cre amour m’a gonfl8 de torpeurs enivrantes. O que ma quille 8clate! O que j’aille / la mer!428

Edward Fitzgerald expressed much the same idea in his sceptical and epicurean adaptation of the rubais or quatrains of Omar Khayy#m quoted above. Life is here represented as a wilderness, with battered caravanserays, and life as a caravan blindly plodding its way through the desert. The wise old poet, frustrated in all attempts at constructing a good, purposeful world with a benevolent creator and noble aim, perverts scriptural formulae by repeatedly calling on his readers to “Awake!”, not for morning prayers but morning drink. Intoxicating wine and intoxicating poetry join forces to relieve man of the pains and injustices of life, turning the wilderness into an artificial paradise: Here with a loaf of bread beneath the Bough, A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse – and Thou Beside me singing in the Wilderness – And Wilderness is Paradise enow.429

In Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822), De Quincey had described how, when he felt like lost on the vast ocean of death and disorientated and depressed in a vast city, he had experienced the drug trafficker who first made him acquainted with the “celestial drug” as a “minister of celestial pleasures […] sent down to earth on a special mission” to himself.430 His pervasive religious associations are mixed with the imagery of ignes fatui and femmes fatales, unmasking religion as the product of an irresistible desire which, however, ultimately leads man to hell instead of heaven. Yet his insight provides no help. The “pleasures of opium”, intensifying the Romantic writer’s observation of life as well as his enjoyment and production of art, are madly pursued and invariably 428 Rimbaud, Le bateau ivre, MS 1871, lines 89–92, in: Œuvres complHtes, ed. Rolland de Ren8ville – Jules Mouquet, BibliothHque de la Pl8iade, Paris 1963, 103. 429 Fitzgerald, Rub#iy#t of Omar Khayy#m, 1859, stanza 11 (first edition), 242. 430 De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, 1822, in: Works, II. 42.

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followed by the “pains of opium”, so that he must change the dose in order to regain the pleasures, and so on, in an absurd, inescapable circle as he becomes a slave to self-destructive passion.431 De Quincey remembered Coleridge’s poem “The Pains of Sleep” (MS 1803, 1816), which described repeated, guilt-ridden Gothic nightmares that were obviously due to withdrawal symptoms – the “pains of opium”. The opium eater De Quincey’s Romantic enjoyment of music and search for the original language of man in music, following the principle of ut musica poesis, fails. His visits to the opera, under the euphoria of opium consumption, end in depression with the end of the performance, and repeated visits cannot perpetuate the ecstatic art experience.432 There is no aim to be attained, and no constancy save in death. De Quincey’s reference to the philosopher and heretic Baruch Spinoza, who failed to complete his treatise on the emendation of the human intellect, illustrates his own ultimately hopeless situation, as well as the fragmentary character of his Confessions.433 De Quincey’s later sequel, Suspiria de Profundis (1845, 1891), elaborates on these central ideas of Romantic Disillusionism with recurrence to imagery of palimpsests and buried cities. In order to vanquish all-devouring time by recalling the buried past and re-establishing the connection with Paradise Lost, like Wordsworth, or regaining the lost light and fire of the Eternals, like Blake, the narrator has recourse to opium. It provides temporary rest in the accelerated hurry of the world, temporary recovery of the lost strata of memory in the palimpsest of the mind, and the temporary illusion of timelessness. But, unlike the simply structured recoveries achieved by the simple techniques of the simple “monkish chemists” of the “middle ages” in their work on palimpsests, the memories of the modern opium eater are crowded and chaotic, making no sense, and the awakening from those dreams to bleak reality is increasingly cruel and painful.434 It is a repeated, sobering experience that will, however, not safeguard the opium eater from chasing new, futile dreams, any more than Byron’s experienced heroes will search for new dreams and illusions of happiness in love and eternity in fame. About the same time, the Positive Romantic Emerson stated that true pmeulatijoi, or “representative men”, would need no auxiliaries such as drugs: The spirit of the world, the great calm presence of the creator, comes not forth to the sorceries of opium and of wine. […] That is not an inspiration which we owe to narcotics, but some counterfeit excitement and fury.435

431 432 433 434 435

Note the book’s successive chapters The Pleasures of Opium, The Pains of Opium. Ibid. II. 47–49. Ibid. II. 63. De Quincey, Suspiria de Profundis, in: Works, XV. 172–173. Emerson, The Poet, in: Essays. Second Series, 1844, in: Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte, Library of America, New York 1983, 460.

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De Quincey described life as a palimpsest of the most various, accidental, and contradictory experiences that resists all attempts to construct a purpose or aim. Charles Lamb, who introduced De Quincey’s Confessions to the London Magazine, suggested the same doubt in his Elia-essay “Old China” (1823, 1833). The cold artifices of Elia and Bridget’s collections of old china lead the introspective observers to thoughts on various experiences and feelings of hot youth, which even the riches of Croesus and Rothschild cannot recover. They have become inaccessibly buried under crusts of fictionalization and stylization. A similar Humean scepticism is expressed in Charles Lamb’s comparison of the mind to a white sheet on which life inscribed the most heterogeneous impressions, like a chaotic medley of extempore poems written into a fashionable hold-all album without a unifying theme or quality. In the common Romantic Disillusionist view of the drug addict De Quincey and the alcohol addict Lamb, childhood and the original state of innocence cannot be regained, neither in this world nor that to come after death: FRESH clad from heaven in robes of white, A young probationer of light, Thou wert, my soul, an Album bright, A spotless leaf; but thought, and care, And friend and foe, in foul or fair, Have ‘written strange defeatures’ there; […] Disjointed numbers, sense unknit; Huge reams of folly, shred of wit; Compose the mingled mass of it. My scalded eyes no longer brook Upon this ink-blurr’d thing to look – Go, shut the leaves, and clasp the book.436

The passage of time and progressive loss of childhood is a central motif of Lamb’s Elia-essays, from “New Year’s Eve” to “My First Play”, though without Blake’s and Wordsworth’s Platonic consolations of a possible Paradise Regained. Consequently, the sense of the irrecoverable loss of childhood is also conveyed through the doubt of resurrection. In “Blakesmoor, in H—–-—shire”, published shortly after the news of Elia’s falsely announced death and false resurrection (March 1823), the derelict and decaying Gothic mansion stands in little hope of 436 Charles Lamb, In My Own Album, in: Works, V. 154.

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being revived.437 The Romantic Disillusionism of the Gothic deals with decay and death, not resurrection. The comically resurrected adult Elia is spellbound by Blakesmoor’s Gothic. He can reawaken some disjointed memories of his childhood days in Blakesmoor, but remains the adult who cannot relive the full experience of his childhood. He fictionalizes his memories just as, when a boy, he fictionalized his identity as an aristocrat among illustrious ancestors. The visions of “Elia” are the fictions of “a liar”, not of a Platonic or Wordsworthian visionary. In the Classical Judaeo-Christian-Platonic Tradition and in Positive Romanticism, the hour of death reveals part of the true world beyond the senses – Emerson’s “substance”, as distinct from “appearance”. It is the aim of life to return to its original home, out of which man was born and into which he returns as an old man. In Romantic Disillusionism, by contrast, the hour of death reveals nothing but “vanity”, in the Latin sense of emptiness, without wind or spirit. Intoxicated by drinking from the chalice of life, Lermontov says, we ultimately see that the golden chalice is empty and that the contents that enticed us were a mere dream.438 We know the fact, but the knowledge makes us neither wiser nor better, as we greedily and perversely drink on. Poetry in Romantic Disillusionism, then, is frequently degraded from a priestly prophecy to an intoxicating anodyne for fear and pain, a Leopardian fraud (“inganno”) or Heinean song of childish self-encouragement in the dark, or indeed a drug providing the forgetfulness and joy recommended by Fitzgerald’s Omar Khayy#m. This is even more negative than Musset’s kindred view of poetry and the imagination providing a constructive, though only temporary, relief from suffering, the ultimately unconquerable condition of man forever moving and never improving in an absurd and vicious circle of hope and disillusion: Ich, ein tolles Kind, ich singe Jetzo in der Dunkelheit; Klingt das Lied auch nicht ergötzlich, Hats mich doch von Angst befreit.439

Byron’s Tasso, confined in his madhouse and epitomizing man’s confinement in a madhouse world, has just finished his epic Gerusalemme Liberata, the writing of which had temporarily carried him out of the reality of his existence. His dramatic monologue begins when the ecstasy of his imaginative flight is over ; the drug no longer works and the awareness of man’s inescapable suffering 437 Charles Lamb, Last Essays of Elia, Blakesmoor in H—––shire, 1833, in: Works, II. 13. 438 Lermontov, HQiQ ÚYX^Y, MS 1831, posth. 1859, in: Gedichte, ed. cit. 40. 439 Heine, Buch der Lieder, Die Heimkehr, I, 1823–1824, 1827, lines 9–12, in: Sämtliche Schriften, I. 106.

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returns, which he decides (although fails) to bear with the Byronic hero’s pride and scorn: But this is o’er – my pleasant task is done: – My long-sustaining friend of many years! If I do blot thy final page with tears, Know, that my sorrows have wrung from me none. […] Thou too art ended – what is left me now? For I have anguish yet to bear –440

Drugs and art are almost indispensable to those narrators and characters in the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe who are not merely static, respectable bourgeoisie. Poised somewhere between the extremes of pathological monomania and bourgeois fixation, participating in madness without falling victim to it and remaining isolated from the blind, conventional observations of the crowd, they vainly seek to reintegrate the world’s dichotomies. To various degrees, they drift from physicality to spirituality, from vitality to morbidity, and from sanity to monomania, thus threatening to or actually losing their hold on life. There is no indication that the Fall of man may be reversed, and no consolation that Paradise may be regained either in this world or one to come. Drugs and art support those unreliable narrators’ and erratic characters’ searches for truth (ever denied to the bourgeoisie) and numb their intense pain of life – the price they pay for their insights. In contrast to Platonism, these insights are, moreover, saddening and disillusioning. Thus the narrator of “The Oval Portrait” (1845)441 is a bleeding, feverish, suffering man under the influence of opium whose epiphanic discovery of the beautiful portrait and its sad history reveals to him the unbridgeable gulf between physicality and spirituality, as well as between life and art, analogous to the contrariety of Poe’s Rowena and Ligeia. Staring at the portrait and the book, the narrator repeats the experience of the studious and austere painter whose commitment to art had painted the life out of his beautiful and vivacious wife. To kill real love for that of an imaginative portrait is to sacrifice body to spirit, sanity to monomania, and ultimately to disintegrate reality, just as, in “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” (1844), the mesmerist Templeton’s imaginary world destroys the real one, his patient Bedloe, or as, in Hoffmann’s tale “Der Magnetiseur” (1814), the mesmerist Alban’s imagination destroys his patient Maria.442 Highly qualified doctors, traditionally credited with a healing and restorative imagination, mutate into killers. In any case, reality in Poe’s fiction 440 Byron, The Lament of Tasso, 1817, 2. 33–36 and 43–44. 441 This “tale of the arabesque” was first published in a longer version entitled Life in Death (1842), in: Poe, Collected Works, II. 659. 442 Link, Edgar Allan Poe, 203–204, 215.

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and poetry is shown as no longer being ascertainable, neither to its characters nor its readers, so that “indefiniteness” is one of its chief characteristics and source of its Burkean “sublime”.443 The reader can, in fact, never be sure what exactly happens and what is created by the diseased consciousness of the tortured, erratic narrators. Ultimately, the reader doubts whether the narrator’s deceptive dream-experience is not the epistemological human condition in a world that is little more than a hoax.444 This leaves the disillusioning impression that art, instead of fixing and transcending the fleeting moment of highest beauty and pleasure as in Keats and Positive Romantic poetology, is parasitic and, on the contrary, contributes to the destruction of a life “Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies”.445 Later, in Swinburne’s “The Garden of Proserpine” (1866) and “The Lake of Gaube” (1904), all psychedelic intoxication (medicinal as well as poetic) appears as providing the best possible state in this worst of all worlds. This was a Poesque condition close to death in which pain became ultimately mixed with joy and ecstasy – a new Decadent convergence of 3qyr and h\mator which was its own aim in default of the certainty of a better world beyond; a transitory state in which man was not yet lost in final destruction. The romantique d8froqu8 read the creation as a book of symbols pointing him and his fallen readers to an imaginary, natural paradise which probably never existed and which hence could never be regained, remaining forever lost in the creator’s original sin, creation itself. As Fitzgerald’s Moslem Omar Khayy#m puts it in a heretical prayer, God, as the designer of this sinful and poisonous non-paradise, demands man’s forgiveness for his sins, but man must ask for God’s forgiveness for the act of creation: Oh Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make, And who with Eden didst devise the Snake; For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man Is blacken’d – Man’s forgiveness give – and take!446

The Gnostic view of creation as the creator’s original sin pervades the works of Baudelaire, whose Fleurs du mal (1857) appeared two years before Fitzgerald’s Rub#iy#t of Omar Khayy#m.447 The Negative Romantic Baudelaire’s concept of

443 Poe, Poems, Letter to Mr B, 1831, in: Poetry and Tales, ed. Patrick F. Quinn, Library of America, New York 1984, 17. Cf. Poe, Marginalia, April 1849, in: Essays and Reviews, ed. G.R. Thompson, Library of America, New York 1984, 1435–1436, where Poe elaborated the Romantic view of the sister arts, “ut musica poesis”. 444 Thompson, Poe’s Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales, 132–135. 445 Keats, Ode to a Nightingale, 1819, line 26, in: Poems, ed. cit. 527. 446 Fitzgerald, Rub#iy#t of Omar Khayy#m, 1859, stanza 81 (first edition), 264. 447 For Baudelaire’s Gnostic pessimism see especially his diaries, Fus8es (1855–1862) and Mon

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nature was the polar opposite to Pope’s “Unerring nature, still divinely bright, One clear, unchanged, and universal light”.448 To Baudelaire, nature was rather a state of depravation to be temporarily surmounted by art and maquillage449, as natural man’s “spleen” (i. e. his depression due to the reality of life after dreaming of “l’id8al”)450 was to be temporarily surmounted by drugs. The Gnostic Baudelaire and the Gnostic Nerval lacked the Gnostic Blake’s forced Positive Romantic faith in Paradise Regained and the New Jerusalem, with the ultimate fall of the creator-demiurge Urizen and man’s redemption from fallen nature, Urizen’s original sin. They fashioned themselves as Luciferic or Byronic rebels against the tyranny of established Heavens, spoilers of the traditional dogmatic theogonies of all religions, as the speaker of Nerval’s ChimHres-sonnet “Ant8ros” (1854), and they mixed Christian and pagan myths without Blake’s Platonic belief in universal reintegration: Ils m’ont plong8 trois fois dans les eaux du Cocyte, Et, prot8geant tout seul ma mHre Amal8cyte, Je ressHme / ses pieds les dents du vieux dragon.451

According to William Blake, the Fall of man – itself a myth describing the demiurge’s crime of creation – had led to a petrification of free-floating myths into the dogmas of established churches, debasing and narrowing universal myths of salvation into creeds and histories of salvation, hammering them into brazen books such as the Bible and the Koran that were propagated by fraudulent priests and kings for the maintenance of their power over originally, naturally free human beings. Blake’s soteriological faith in the French Revolution as a necessary antithesis preceding a necessary synthesis – the millennium as Paradise Regained – remained vital and unshaken throughout his life, expressed in shifting imaginative and mythopoetic visions. For Radicals born half a generation before Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, such as Blake and Helen Maria Williams (who were in their thirties when the French Revolution was drowned in the Terror), it was easier to retain faith in a dialectic completion of history than for Radicals born in the 1770s (who were disillusioned in their late teens or early twenties and gradually turned into conservatives). In Blake’s prophetic vision, empires and their dark, established religions will collapse,

448 449 450 451

cœur mis / nu (1859–1866); for his new, non-metaphysical Romantic symbolism see Les fleurs du mal, Correspondances, lines 1–4, in: Œuvres complHtes, 11. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, 1711, lines 68–73. Baudelaire, Le peintre de la vie moderne, Ploge du maquillage, 1863, 1182–1185. Baudelaire, Les fleurs du mal, Spleen et id8al, 1857, four consecutive poems entitled Spleen, 68–71, and Le spleen de Paris, 1869, 231–319. Nerval, Les ChimHres, Ant8ros, 1854, lines 12–14, in: Œuvres, ed. Albert B8guin – Jean Richer, BibliothHque de la Pl8iade, Paris 1961–1966, I. 5. The stress is on the insistent repetition of the rebellious act, as Anteros will ever fight Eros.

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“sweet science” (meaning reintegrating myth) will overcome rationalism and empiricism, sexual energy will no longer be fettered by “mind-forged manacles” – Blake’s interpretation of the myth of the resurrection: Forth from the dead dust rattling, bones to bones Join; shaking, convulsed, the shivering clay breathes, And all flesh naked stands: fathers and friends; Mothers and infants; kings and warriors: The grave shrieks with delight and shakes Her hollow womb, and clasps the solid stem; Her bosom swells with wild desire, And milk and blood and glandous wine In rivers rush and shout and dance On mountain, dale and plain.452

Blake’s reimagination of the Eucharist’s completed dialectic in Vala, or, The Four Zoas (1795–1804), where grains are crushed to flour in order to become bread and the body of Christ as well as grapes being crushed to must in order to become wine and the blood of Christ, is demonstratively and repeatedly deconstructed by his admirer and critic Swinburne. The former theology student’s sadomasochist’s imagination turned round the crushing of red grapes, but represented the blood-red must as the final stage, symbolic of all pleasure ending in pain and all remembrance in oblivion. This is the disillusioning message of his poem with the derogatory title “Rococo” (1866). The dialectical process of both Christian and Positive Romantic dogma, a result of man’s florid dreams and religious artifice, ends in the antithesis. The experience of the brothel gives the lie to the wishful thinking of Platonism: We have heard from hidden places What love scarce lives and hears. We have seen on fervent faces The pallor of strange tears: We have trod the wine-vat’s treasure, Whence, ripe to steam and stain, Foams round the feet of pleasure The blood-red must of pain.453

As is apparent from the case of Swinburne and his treatment of Blake, the Negative Romantics were romantiques d8froqu8s in that they also reread biblical and other myths, albeit for the contrary purpose of discrediting any belief in 452 Blake, The Song of Los, Asia, 1795, lines 55–64, in: Poems, 252. 453 Swinburne, Poems and Ballads, Rococo, lines 33–40, in: Complete Works, Bonchurch Edition, ed. E. Gosse – T.J. Wise, London 1925, I. 247. Note the poem’s insistent rhyme sequences “pleasure – pain” and “remember – forget”, marking the pattern of illusion succeeded by final disillusion.

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rebirth and Paradise Regained. It has been demonstrated that Heine, who was of Jewish birth, and Leopardi, who had a sufficient knowledge of Hebrew, adopted traditional midrashic interpretations of the Bible to the unconventional end of dismantling the truth-value inherent in the messianic apocalypse.454 The noun ML7B is a derivative of the verb ML7, ‘to search’, meaning rabbinic accumulation of constantly renewed readings of texts taken out of their contexts in order to find ever-new levels of affirmative meaning, a technique later imitated by the Metaphysical or Baroque poets and preachers. This “continuous rereading or revisioning of the text”455 had a Jewish and a Christian tradition, which, as will be seen, Byron used along with Heine and Leopardi – and other Negative Romantics – to subversive ends. We can distinguish successive phases of the Romantic Movement, declining in Romantic intensity with regard to dialectical revolutionary expectations. Blake, the very first Romantic poet in the generation of Preromantics, born in the 1750s, could stand firm in his dialectical belief in an approaching millennium. When the French Revolution ended in chaos and brought forth a new empire instead of paradise, and when the Industrial Revolution produced more dark Satanic mills than New Jerusalems in England’s green and pleasant land, Blake was old enough to cope with disappointment and remain faithful to his vision of a millennial future. The first generation proper of male Romantic poets born in the 1770s, represented by Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Robert Southey, was less fortunate. Before and after the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, they were Radicals like Blake, with a professed belief in a millennium ante portas,456 but the hopes of their early years were soon shattered, and their youthful disposition could not stand the shock. Despairing of a terrestrial paradise, Coleridge and Southey tried a paradise of liberty, equality, and fraternity on a smaller scale in the first of many pantisocratic experiments. When that failed, they reduced their expectations still further, transposing them to aesthetics in the egalitarian programme of their Lyrical Ballads (1798, 1800), just like Novalis in his simultaneously written poetological Fragmente with its programme of a Romanticization of the world (1799–1800).457 Finally, they transposed their expectations of a better world into that beyond, thus relinquishing their holistic Romantic concept of a non-institutionalized religion altogether, embracing traditional 454 D. Fabbroni – G. Nisbet, Heinrich Heine and Giacomo Leopardi: The Rhetoric of Midrash, Frankfurt am Main and New York 2000, passim. 455 Ibid. 6. The authors, however, ignore the Christian (Baroque) tradition, which followed the study of the rabbis. Rolf Lessenich, The “Metaphysicals”: English Baroque Literature in Context, in: Erfurt Electronic Studies in English’, 7 (2001). Multimedia Database. Last accessed 8 August 2016. 456 N. Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years, Oxford 1988. 457 Gerhard Kaiser, Literarische Romantik, 60.

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Christian doctrines and converting to established churches, like many others of their generation on the Continent: Chateaubriand, Friedrich Schlegel, Joseph Görres, Ludwig van Beethoven.458 Friedrich Hölderlin, born in the same year as Wordsworth, was less fortunate. While trying hard to maintain his revolutionary faith after Napoleon’s takeover and attack on Germany, he did not succeed in overcoming disillusion like his Hyperion or the speaker of his poem “Patmos”. Instead, the disillusioned Hölderlin chose the pose of his Empedocles and flung himself into the abyss of his insanity.459 The younger generation of English, male, Romantic poets born in the late 1780s and early 1790s, represented by Percy Shelley and John Keats, however, could easily take Blake’s position and ridicule the Wordsworths, Coleridges, and Southeys as cowards and traitors. They lacked the traumatic experiences of the Terror of 1793–1794 and Napoleon’s seizure of power in 1799, but were not spared the depression that increasingly paralysed the European Radicals and democrats after the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815). Keats’s, like Percy Shelley’s, view of history was mostly optimistic and dialectical, as attested by his two Hyperions and his journal-letter of 17–27 September 1819. Evil would forever follow good, but new good would forever spring from evil, effecting a continual change for the better. This had been taught to him at Dissenting Enfield, where he read William Robertson and discussed history with the Clarkes.460 Another Dissenter, Leigh Hunt, to whose circle of Radicals in Hampstead Keats belonged and who gave him his first boost as a poet, was still in prison for libelling the Prince Regent when he wrote his Platonic optimistic masque The Descent of Liberty (MS 1814, 1815). Maintaining his Prinzip Hoffnung in the dark times of the Congress of Vienna and the return of the victorious ancien r8gime’s oppressions, Hunt wrote a mythopoetic vision of the return of Liberty with the fall of the “Enchanter” Napoleon, casting him as the last in a line of European tyrants. The expiration of tyranny is marked by Napoleon’s twilight nature of good and bad enchanter. Hunt’s masque was written against the depression of the time, as was a more famous one by another of his circle, Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (MS 1818, 1819), a prophetic vision of imprisonment succeeded by liberation, of hatred and destruction succeeded by universal love and peace, of night succeeded by twilight and broad daylight, and of winter succeeded by spring and a paradise of flowers. The palpable reality, however, was very different, represented by Hunt’s Experience and Sable Genius. A note of doubt comes into the vision when Liberty, in view of the permanence of slavery, 458 This decline is symbolized in Wordsworth’s description of his forced descent from Mount Snowdon, in The Prelude (1805–1806), VI. 494–542, ed. E. de Selincourt, Oxford English Texts, Oxford 1959, 206–208. 459 F. Burwick, Poetic Madness and the Romantic Imagination, 203–228. 460 Nicholas Roe, John Keats and the Culture of Dissent, Oxford 1997, 1998, 51–60.

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reduces the prophecy of the imminent millennium of universal freedom and peace to a possibility : […] and should at last The dream come true, I will myself inspire Those noblest of their race, who walk in lustre Beneath the star of this my genius here, To rise once more in their brave scorn, and win One last, preventing, and perfecting triumph.461

Prophecy, the imaginative mind’s vision of the future and ultimate truth, may after all be deceptive, leading nowhere except to a horrifying perception of nothingness. Mary Shelley’s Beatrice, the “prophetess” of her historical novel Valperga (1823), sees all her ambitions and visions of future political and personal happiness come to nothing. The civil wars in Italy continue, the Inquisition arrests her on a charge of being a witch and suppresses all efforts towards liberty, and her beloved Castruccio deserts her for Euthanasia. When the deceptive veil, the “heavenly issue”, is lifted it unmasks prophecy as mere wishful thinking, or even mental insanity, in an unreformable and purposeless world. Beatrice’s awakening from her vision is like awakening from an opium dream, leaving her disconsolate: How cold were these words to the burning heart of the prophetess; she, who thought that Heaven had singled out Castruccio to unite him to her, who thought that the Holy Spirit had revealed himself to bless their union, that, by the mingled strength of his many qualities, and her divine attributes, some great work might be fulfilled on earth; who saw all as God’s command, and done by his special interposition; to find this heavenly tissue swept away, beaten down, and destroyed!462

Personal and political disillusionment went hand in hand. The evil of the French Revolution and Napoleon came to no good, but instead led only to the new evil of the restoration of the ancien r8gime in Europe. This explains the disillusionment in Keats’s Lamia (1819). He obviously based it on the Neoclassicist Thomas Love Peacock’s narrative poem Rhododaphne (1818), approaching Peacock’s rationalist doubt about the truth and vitality of the Romantic imagination apparent in the final dissolution of Anthemion’s nymph Rhododaphne and the resurrection of Anthemion’s mortal girl Calliro[. Keats’s Lamia is no longer the typical Romantic femme fatale seeking to destroy man, but rather a femme fragile, an allegory of weakened imagination easily destroyed by Apollonius or reason. Percy Shelley’s millennial vision in Prometheus Unbound (1820) was followed by The Triumph of Life (1822), an anti-millennial vision foreshadowed 461 Hunt, The Descent of Liberty, 1815, 711–716, ed. cit. V. 119. 462 M. Shelley, Valperga, 1823, ed. Stuart Curran, New York and Oxford 1997, 206. The chapter is entitled “Fall of Beatrice”, inverting the progress of Dante’s Beatrice back to earth.

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by his “Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills” (MS October 1818), which was written in depression during his residence in Byron’s beautiful Este villa after the death of Byron’s little daughter Clara,463 and The Cenci (MS summer 1819), written in connection with the death of Shelley’s little son William. Thus, Shelley interrupted the composition of his most famous Positive Romantic work several times to express Romantic Disillusionism, the ever-present dark underside of millennial faith in Paradise Regained, and one that was laid bare when the poet was shaken by personal and political catastrophes.464 In Prometheus Unbound (MS 1819), the “painted veil” designates the “loathsome mask” of mere appearances in the sense of Platonism, the unfortunate impediment to the positive epiphany.465 By contrast, in Shelley’s disillusionist sonnet “Lift not the painted veil”, also composed while writing Prometheus Unbound, the veil acts to highlight the illusion under which lurks a nihilistic horror, a merciful though flimsy protector against a negative epiphany, Schopenhauer’s “Schleier der Maya”.466 In life’s Byronic “deep wide sea of Misery”,467 man loses faith in a better world beyond and seeks out green islands, places of temporary repose, only to find ever vanishing beautiful scenes and ever vanishing dreams of paradise. Apocalypse, the lifting of the theatrical veil misnamed as life, does not reveal any metaphysical truth, but only the irreconcilable antinomies of Fear and Hope, “twin Destinies, who ever weave Their shadows o’er the chasm, sightless and drear”.468 Decades later the image of the simultaneously deceptive and protective veil recurred in Emily Bront[’s polemically anti-Platonic poems. “Stars” (1845) features a speaker who prefers night, dreams, and opium to light and clear reason. At night, he sees everything meld in a soothing vision of universal coherence; when day breaks and the anodyne effect is lost, he feels tortured by the realization of the disconnectedness of all things and closes his eyelids to the all-illuminating sun to exclude the “hostile light” under their veil: My lids closed down – yet through their veil I saw him blazing still; And steep in gold the misty dale, And flash upon the hill – 463 Andrew Stauffer in TLS, 5485 (16 May 2008), 15. 464 Michael O’Neill, Percy Bysshe Shelley : A Literary Life, New York 1989, 71, 89. 465 P.B. Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, 1820, III. IV. 190–197, in: Poetical Works, 253. The speaker is the Spirit of the Hour. The image of the secrets of nature hidden underneath a veil (to be lifted by priests, visionaries, or scientists) was a topos both in biblical and profane texts; see the etymon of Apocalyse (Revelation) and Schiller’s ballad Das verschleierte Bild zu Sa"s (1795). 466 Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, § 63. Maya was the Hindu goddess of illusion that Hindu (like Platonic) philosophy taught the empirical world to be. 467 P.B. Shelley, Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills, line 2, 1819, ibid. 554. 468 P.B. Shelley, Lift Not the Painted Veil, posth. 1824, lines 5–6, ibid. 569.

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[…] O Stars, and Dreams and Gentle Night – O, Night and Stars return! And hide me from the hostile light That does not warm, but burn –469

Emily Bront[’s choice of a church hymn stanza is ironic and increases the poem’s heresy. In her father’s library at Haworth Parsonage, she was a keen reader of the Romantic poets, knowing Shelley and Keats as well as Byron. Keats’s millennial vision in his second Hyperion was written parallel to The Cap and Bells (MSS Nov.– Dec. 1819), shortly before his departure to Italy, the Romantic Disillusionism of the latter undercutting and recanting the Romantic Platonism of the former – a fact which may serve to explain why the two Hyperions were left as unfinished as The Cap and Bells. Again, the two works may be read as two sides of the same coin, or two different, but complementary, views of human life and history taken by the same author in two contrary moods: faith and doubt. Feeling or knowing of their approaching deaths, both Percy Shelley and Keats formulated an anti-Platonic and sceptical world view that was close to Byron’s, whose Don Juan they both knew, doubting any millennial synthesis here or in the hereafter, and indeed any meaning in man’s life and history.470 Though converted from Radicalism to Toryism and from a Romantic poet to an anti-Jacobin novelist with Waverley (1814), Walter Scott lapsed into Byron’s Negative Romanticism when, under the shock of a serious illness, he wrote The Bride of Lammermoor (1819). Edgar of Ravenswood is a Byronic hero, quite different from Rousseau’s Saint-Preux, Mackenzie’s Harley, and Goethe’s Werther. Pre-revolutionary Sturm und Drang confidence had given way to sombre fatalism. Disillusionment is the plot’s chief theme and motif. The star-crossed romantic lovers, Lucy Ashton and Edgar of Ravenswood, have visions of a paradisiacal future, but are frustrated by the sad reality of hatred, family feuds and politics, and ancien r8gime marriage arrangements. In this respect, Scott’s Bride of Lammermoor may have inspired Thomas Lovell Beddoes’s early Bride’s Tragedy (1822), in which the romantic love of Hesperus and Floribel is doomed to end in madness and death, for the same reasons. Established prejudice and injustice appear as ultimately invincible. Coleridge, who, as his notebooks show, was a great lover of Cologne and the Rhine Valley – and even admired the rituals of Cologne Catholicism – nevertheless wrote his satirical sonnet on Cologne’s dirt, stench, religious cant, and prostitution. It was not just a scatological skit, but an expression of constantly upsurging Romantic Disillusionism in view of bleak realities that gave the lie to 469 E. Bront[, Stars, MS 10 April 1845, lines 25–28, 41–44, in: Poems, 169–170. 470 The first two cantos of Byron, Don Juan, had been published in July of the same year.

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idealistic expectations. When he visited Cologne in 1828, instead of the 11,000 British virgins of legend he found 11,000 German prostitutes, and instead of the famous smell of Eau de Cologne he found the stench of the open sewers. Similar disillusionments happened to Romantic visitors to other Romantic locations in Europe, Venice, Odessa, or Constantinople: In Köhln, a town of monks and bones, And pavement fang’d with murderous stones And rags, and hags, and hideous wenches; I counted two and seventy stenches, All well defined, and several stinks! Ye Nymphs that reign o’er sewers and sinks, The river Rhine, it is well known, Doth wash your city of Cologne; But tell me, Nymphs, what power divine Shall henceforth wash the river Rhine?471

In stanzas on the journey through Russia later omitted from the printed version of Pushkin’s Evgeny Onegin (1825–1833), the narrator describes and comments on his hero’s experience of Tauris (the Crimean peninsula) and his own experience of Odessa, recalling Childe Harold’s experience of Venice. On seeing the beauty of these legendary places from afar, both hero and narrator remember literary texts and classical myths, their disillusionment and “ennui” notwithstanding. But on arrival, they are struck by totally anti-paradisiacal realities. The stenches, dirt, rot, and inundations of Odessa are presented with the characteristic Byronic technique of bubble-pricking, in stanzas that stand halfway between Byron and Baudelaire’s “Un Voyage / CythHre” (1857): For five, six weeks a year Odessa, At Zeus’s tempest-bringing pleasure, Is flooded, blocked, its conduits burst, Into the thickest mud immersed, With houses sinking two feet under ; Only pedestrians on stilts Dare breach the cumulative silts.472

Even Blake’s contemporary and fellow Radical William Godwin (born in 1756, the year before Blake) could not stand the shock of disillusion, that generation’s maturer age notwithstanding. Godwin’s Philosophical Radicalism based on his early millennial trust in the reformative power of an extreme and independent 471 Coleridge, Cologne, MS 1828, in: Poems, ed. E.H. Coleridge, Oxford English Texts, Oxford 1912, 1962, I. 477. 472 Pushkin, Evgeny Onegin, Fragments of Onegin’s Journey, 1825–1833, stanza 13, lines 5–11, transl. cit. 204.

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raison franÅaise, as expressed both in his Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793) and in his first novel Caleb Williams (1794), soon gave way to increasing political disillusion. His meeting with his later wife Mary Wollstonecraft taught him the indispensability of domestic affections, and his meeting with Coleridge taught him the indispensability of the creative imagination. Both concurred with his disappointment over the outcome of the French Revolution, moderating his revolutionary expectations before withdrawing into artistic privacy. His second novel, Travels of St Leon (1799), is a Gothic tale of repeated disappointments, both political and private, with an end that allows hope and happiness on a private, domestic level alone. The novel’s political message is sceptical of historical progress, as its titular hero and fictitious narrator arrives at a view of history that repeats itself in a circular manner. Godwin’s readers could easily see the parallels between St Leon’s experiences at the end of the sixteenth century and their own two hundred years later, at the end of the eighteenth century, with human nature consistently opposed to substantial progress. Aristocratic pride, greed for wealth and power, lust for love and war, egoism and cruelty towards one’s fellow creatures, and all the other roots of the world’s evils might, one suspects, never be overcome by any Renaissance or Enlightenment: Oh, no! human affairs, like the waves of the ocean, are merely in a state of ebb and flow : ‘there is nothing new under the sun;’ two centuries perhaps after Philip the Second shall be gathered to his ancestors [he died in 1598], men shall learn over again to persecute each other for conscience sake; other anabaptists or levellers shall furnish pretexts for new persecutions; other inquisitors shall arise in the most enlightened tracts of Europe; and professors from their chair, sheltering their intolerance under the great names of Aristotle and Cicero, shall instruct their scholars, that a heterodox doctrine is the worst of crimes, and that the philanthropy and purity of heart in which it is maintained, only render its defenders the more worthy to be extirpated.473

A similar decline in expectations can even be observed in the history of German Idealist philosophy. The early, high-reaching, epistemological aims gradually gave way to more moderate, empirical, a posteriori enquiries, as in Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling’s final anti-Kantian negation of all possibilities of any a priori knowledge.474 The case of the female Romantic poets presents some obvious, though distinct, parallels. The earlier generation, represented by Anna Letitia Barbauld, Hannah More, Helen Maria Williams, and Mary Robinson, violated male expectations of feminine writing throughout their literary careers by interfering in 473 Godwin, St Leon, 1799, ed. Pamela Clemit, The World’s Classics, Oxford, 1994, 338. For Godwin’s decline in expectations and his novel’s scepticism see Pamela Clemit’s Introduction, VII–XXIII. 474 Schelling, Einleitung in die Philosophie der Offenbarung (MS Berlin 1841–1842).

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matters of state and taking more or less Jacobin views of society, approaching those of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays. The later generation, represented by Felicia Hemans and Letitia Elizabeth Landon, demonstratively conformed to (yet subtly subverted) male expectations of “integrally feminine” writing prima facie reduced to the tender praise of traditional domestic virtues.475 With memories of the cruel behaviour of women in the French Revolution and with the experience of the reactionary Congress of Vienna, their Positive Romanticism declined to seemingly conservative – though deeply ambiguous and doubtridden – Biedermeier. Its hallmark was demonstrative resignation with indirectly implied disagreement, not the radical negation of dialectical synthesis as formulated in male Negative Romanticism.476 When Hemans died of tuberculosis in 1835, Landon (who had only three more years to live) wrote her epicedium, only seemingly akin to Percy Shelley’s on Keats. After a long prologue repeating the self-fashioning of the Positive Romantic poet and likening Hemans to Keats as victims of ill–meaning critics, Landon proceeds to specify the role of the female poet as a modern (Byronic rather than Shelleyan) Prometheus. The time-honoured commonplace of the sensitive, imaginative female – as opposed to the rational, controlled male – is slyly changed in favour of women, replacing male “rational and controlled” with male “cold and careless”.477 Hence the “mind of woman” with its “quicker fancies” and “keener feeling” is much better qualified to reveal “the hidden world below” and to cultivate this irredeemable “soil whence pain will never more depart.”478 Instead of rejoicing over the poet’s death with a view to the eternal world beyond, as in Shelley’s Adonais, Landon welcomes Hemans’s premature death as a relief from suffering injustice in a male-dominated and prejudice-ridden world. A world beyond is neither denied nor called in doubt, but left unmentioned. Thus, the poem lacks the heretical directness of Byron’s and Swinburne’s epicedia and covers its Byronism under the Biedermeier veil of a female mourner’s compassionate sensitivity : How is the warm and loving heart requited In this harsh world, where it awhile must dwell; Its best affections wronged, betrayed and slighted – Such is the doom of those who love too well. Better the weary dove should close its pinion, 475 I. Schabert, Englische Literaturgeschichte: Eine neue Darstellung aus der Sicht der Geschlechterforschung, Stuttgart 1997, 446–652. 476 Again, Mary Shelley was an exception to the rule; her novel The Last Man (1826), explicitly took the stance of Negative Romanticism and openly denied millennial hope, as will be shown below. 477 Landon, Felicia Hemans, line 52, 1838, in: Duncan Wu (ed.), Romantic Women Poets: An Anthology, 606. 478 Ibid. lines 49–64.

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Fold up its golden wings and be at peace; Enter, Oh ladye, that serene dominion Where earthly cares and earthly sorrows cease.479

This preference for the calmness of death to the mere vanity of life recurs in Landon’s elegiac poem “The Churchyard”. Unsuccessfully trying to dream among the streaks of light and shade of a pleasant churchyard in summer, the experienced speaker contrasts life’s disillusionments with death’s rest. An eternal world beyond, conventionally visualized in such poems in the tradition of the Preromantic Graveyard School, is not denied but excluded from the “meditations among the tombs”. Again, Biedermeier is a mere mask to veil the female poet’s Romantic Disillusionism: It is the very place to dream Away a twilight’s idle rest; Where Thought floats down a starry stream, Without a shadow on its breast. Where Wealth, the fairy gift, s’our own, Without its low and petty cares; Where Pleasure some new veil has thrown, To hide the weary face she wears. Where hopes are high, yet cares come not, Those fellow-waves of life’s drear sea, Its froth and depth – where Love is what Love only in a dream can be.480

Landon’s speaker even goes so far as to commiserate the living, who “loathe to live yet fear to die”481, and not the dead, especially not those who died early (like Byron’s beloved John Edleston): For human tears are lava-drops, That scorch and wither as they flow ; Then let them fall for those who live, And not for those who sleep below.482

Landon’s implicit opposition to Percy Shelley, with her speaker’s insistence on “vain hope” and “vainer love”, also shows up in her treatment of the myth of Prometheus.483 Romantic Prometheanism was either positive and millennial (Prometheus Finally Unbound) or negative and disillusionist (Prometheus 479 Ibid. lines 69–76. 480 Landon, The Vow of the Peacock and Other Poems, The Churchyard, lines 13–24, London 1835, 292. 481 Ibid. line 64 (final line), 295. 482 Ibid. lines 53–56 and 295. 483 Landon, Felicia Hemans, 55–56.

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Bound Forever). The early Radical millenarianism of Wordsworth and Coleridge had been Platonic and Christian rather than Gnostic. It had been the expression of their Positive Romanticism as well as of their later conservative Christianity, with its shift of synthetic expectation into the Heavenly Jerusalem.484 The Radical millenarianism of Percy Shelley, however, surprisingly resembled Blake’s in its Gnostic component. And it was Percy Shelley, Byron’s close friend and sharer of his moral exile in Italy, who repeatedly and controversially discussed his own views with Byron, and cast these discussions into literary works. In the summer of 1816, when he, his beloved Mary Godwin (later Shelley), Lord Byron, and others, met and worked in the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, the myth of Prometheus was an object of controversial interpretations. Typologically, Prometheus resembled Christ. Like the Christ of orthodoxy, Prometheus had suffered ‘crucifixion’ on a rock to save mankind lost in frost and darkness, providing fire and light. Like the Christ of the Gnostics, Prometheus had revolted against an evil Creator by attempting to alleviate the sufferings of mankind, and had been punished for this revolt by “crucifixion” on a rock. Modern versions and interpretations of the myth were as contradictory as in classical antiquity, all the more as the Romantics felt free to deconstruct and shape it according to their own mythopoetic imaginations. Percy Shelley’s emphasis was on the unbinding and final triumph of Prometheus, analogous to the myth of the resurrection and victory of Christ. His poetic drama Prometheus Unbound (MS Italy 1818–1819) may be read as an answer (and positive complement) to Byron’s hymn “Prometheus” (MS Villa Diodati 1816), which contains the core of Negative Romanticism expressed in reworked myths according to the Romantic concept of new, free-floating mythology. Byron’s demi-god Prometheus, whom Jupiter had ordered to create man and cast him off into a cold world, is also “immortal” and “Godlike”. But, in contrast to Jupiter, he is neither a sadistic nor a bored nor a hoaxing nor an indifferent nor a bungling creator, as are the gods of the Marquis de Sade’s novels and philosophical treatises, Thomas Hardy’s poems and novels, Edgar Allan Poe’s tales, Georg Büchner’s dramas, and Mary Shelley’s “modern Prometheus” Victor Frankenstein (according to her new Negative Romantic reading of the myth in the infancy of modern, Promethean, maledominated science). Unlike them, Byron’s Prometheus feels compassion, though soteriologically useless compassion, for his wretched creatures. This is Byron’s Negative Romantic reading of the myth as quoted above.485 The “recompense” of Byron’s Prometheus is never-ending torture, without any expectation for himself and mankind ever to be “unbound”. He is an Ixion figure in a Tartarus. In contrast to Blake’s and Percy Shelley’s, Byron’s Prometheus is the champion, not 484 Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years, 116–117. 485 Byron, Prometheus, lines 1–4.

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the saviour of mankind, because there will be no dialectical completion in any millennial or paradisiacal synthesis. In Romantic Disillusionism, the Fall and subsequent salvation of man, or Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, are dissociated as true myth and wishful thinking.486 Synthesis, “that grand Wordsworthian achievement […] is broken down into its component elements”.487 Man’s “desiring phantasy”488 has generated a false belief in a benevolent God, but Heaven is in fact “inexorable”, unpitying, deaf to man’s prayers, tyrannical in measuring out an unjust, unconquerable fate. Jupiter and the other gods appear as sadists, mad with lust for power, ruled by a perverse hatred Which for its pleasure doth create The thing it may annihilate.489

As such, they are the heavenly archetypes of earthly tyrants whose only fear and compassion is for the predictable loss of their power. Both heavenly (and immortal) and earthly (and mortal) tyrants come and go, but tyranny remains. Mortal men dream of Paradise Regained, but one tyranny follows another, eternally. Faithful to his name, Prometheus “foresaw” Jupiter’s downfall, but refused to reveal his secret, remaining proud even under excessive torture: All that the Thunderer wrung from thee Was but the menace which flung back On him the torments of thy rack; The fate thou didst so well foresee But would not to appease him tell; And in thy Silence was his Sentence, And in his Soul a vain repentance, And evil dread so ill dissembled, That in his hand the lightnings trembled.490

Prometheus is thus the prototype for all types of Byronic hero;491 a proud defier of, or ironic supplicant to, all tyranny – both divine and human. Where he may know that he cannot win, yet he can still sneer and despise – and proudly suffer and perish – in his “sad unallied existence”. In the imitation of Prometheus rather than Christ, and in perversion of Christian doctrine, he replaces sinful humility with virtuous pride, one that scorns suicide as a confession of cowardice: 486 This is why M.H. Abrams does not include Byron in his magisterial study of Positive Romanticism, Natural Supernaturalism, New York 1971. 487 Virgil Nemoianu, The Taming of Romanticism, 74. 488 Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 4. 121. 7 (Egeria stanzas). 489 Byron, Prometheus, lines 21–22. 490 Ibid. lines 26–34. 491 P.L. Thorslev, The Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes, Minneapolis 1962, passim, and G. Hoffmeister, Byron und der europäische Byronismus, 26.

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And a firm will, and a deep sense, Which even in torture can descry Its own concentered recompense, Triumphant where it dares defy, And making Death a Victory.492

Schopenhauer’s negation of suicide as a means of redemption, usually attributed to his neo-Buddhism, may also have had roots in Byron’s affirmation of pride, like his concept of the Creator as a spiritus malignus. Byron’s Prometheus resembles his own Lucifer, the mentor and tormentor of the Byronic hero Cain, in his awareness that the Creator shares his creatures’ isolation and wretchedness, as well as the courage to accuse him of injustice openly. The biblical doctrine that God created man in his divine image is thus perverted to suggest the possibility of a sadistic, bungling yet suffering creator, desperately solitary in his own Geworfenheit: […] he’d have us so, That he may torture: – let him! He is great – But, in his greatness, is no happier than We in our conflict! […] […] But let him Sit on his vast and solitary throne, Creating worlds, to make eternity Less burthensome to his immense existence And unparticipated solitude!493

Here, Romantic rebellion becomes an act of defiance neither against established creeds and priestcraft nor a demiurge separate from God, but ultimately against the Urgottheit identical with the Schöpfergott, the Original, Eternal, Almighty Creator himself. Prometheus, Lucifer, and Cain are prototypical Byronic heroes, proud rebels whose moods vary between philosophical calm, wrath, sneering, self-loathing, and despair, Souls who dare look the Omnipotent tyrant in His everlasting face, and tell him, that His evil is not good.494

Manichaean religion is interpreted in the sense of being an eternal conflict between God the Omnipotent – the original earthly tyrant – on the one hand, and Prometheus and Lucifer – the original (more or less) noble rebels against tyranny – on the other. Here, the distribution of good and evil is doubtful and 492 Byron, Prometheus, lines 55–59. Note the perversion of I Corinthians 15, 55: “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory”? 493 Byron, Cain: A Mystery, 1821, I/1, 143–151. 494 Ibid. I/1, 138–140.

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relative to the stance of the beholder. Lucifer’s admonition to Cain, one more or less nobly motivated, to use his reason and follow him in braving omnipotent tyranny may be read as a call to interior political emigration, even if open political sedition and revolution is hopeless: One good gift has the fatal apple given – Your reason: – let it not be oversway’d By tyrannous threats to force you into faith ’Gainst all external sense and inward feeling: Think and endure, – and form an inner world In your own bosom – where the outward fails; So shall you nearer be the spiritual Nature, and war triumphant with your own.495

What constitutes Prometheus’s dignity and strength of mind is not to nourish any illusions or desiring fantasies of saviours, heavenly or terrestrial millennia, paradises or Heavenly Jerusalems, nor any purpose and dialectical completion of history. Instead, Prometheus has the Nietzschean courage to face the bleak, unalterable facts of permanent bondage, permanent injustice, and permanent suffering proudly and to accept Paradise Lost as the true myth of all creation. This was Romantic Disillusionism’s version of the !taqan_a (imperturbability or indifference to circumstances) taught by the ancient sceptics Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus. Prometheus and the other Byronic heroes are the perverted “saviours” and “saints” whom Negative Romanticism recommended for imitation: Like thee, Man is in part divine, A troubled stream from a pure source; And Man in portions can foresee His own funereal destiny ; His wretchedness, and his resistance, And his sad unallied existence: To which his Spirit may oppose Itself […]496

Percy Shelley’s and Byron’s contrary versions of the myth of Prometheus thus stand for contrary assessments of liberty. The Positive Romantic ideal of liberty was a belief in the infinity and eternity of the world beyond, a home which nostalgic man bore in mind and which, even in this life, could be recaptured in dreamy and sublime moods. His soul could overstep the narrow confines of reason and widen towards infinite liberty, “als flöge sie nach Haus”.497 Romanticism could successfully rebel against the Age of Reason. Peoples could suc495 Ibid. II/2, 459–466. 496 Byron, Prometheus, 1816, lines 49–54. 497 Eichendorff, Mondnacht, line 12, in Ausgewählte Werke, 27.

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cessfully break their Bastilles, overthrow their tyrants, and adopt free national governments even in this life, acting in millennial anticipation of their final dialectical return home. This is what Negative Romanticism stigmatized as constituting a facile illusion – expressed in the false myths of Prometheus Unbound, Christ Resurrected, and Paradise Regained – and persistently discredited it by the literary technique of anticlimax and bathos, building up false visions and expectations of liberty in order to explode them for the reader’s disillusionment. The idyllic island, the seeming paradise of Byron’s Don Juan and Haid8e, proves a haunt of pirates and a prison. Another, the seeming paradise of Beddoes’s Melveric and Sibylla, proves a haunt of murderers and a prison. And the paradisiacal island of Immalee, Charles Robert Maturin’s child of nature in his Gothic novel Melmoth the Wander (1820), is discredited as an inexperienced girl’s self-deception, given the lie by a neighbouring island of horror and further discredited as the place where the Gothic villain Melmoth meets (and later destroys) the girl’s short-lived innocence and dream of paradise. Confinement, expressed in the myth of Prometheus Bound, is the condition of man, the reality behind illusions of paradisical happiness and liberty as well as the nothingness behind exploded concepts. Positive Romantic visions of the world’s sublimity are replaced by angst-ridden, claustrophobic images that compare the world to a dungeon, a tavern, a madhouse, a cage, and other places of confinement and torture. The call to accept this unalterable condition stoically, with the dignity of Prometheus Bound, sharply distinguishes the Byronic hero from one of his literary models, the titular hero of Chateaubriand’s Ren8 (1802). Unlike Wordsworth’s or Eichendorff ’s Romantic, pious, solitary wanderers as also represented in Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings, who are not lonely because of their feelings of integration in and protection by an orderly universe along with their communion with God, Ren8 is a Romantic solitary plagued by ennui and Weltschmerz as a result of his loss of the true faith and true orientation that Christianity offers him. Chateaubriand’s G8nie du christianisme (1802), for which Atala and Ren8 were planned, was a work of Positive Romanticism, deriving the truth of Christianity from its beauty and goodness in a modernized Platonic jakoj!cah_a, Keats’s “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”.498 Ren8 is the rather passive victim of a modern age, meant as an exemplum horrendum and Christian warning to the pious Christian reader, not a dignified Promethean rebel against the illusion of Christ Resurrected and the injustice of divine law 498 Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn, 1819, line 49, in: Poems, 537. As a believer in religious syncretism rather than a Christian, Keats was a Positive Romantic. Integrative religious syncretism opposed to church dogma was advocated by many Romantic Platonists (Alphonse de Lamartine, Alfred de Vigny, Victor Hugo).

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that forbids incest. Chateaubriand here offered a warning to what the Negative Romantic ostracised and incestuous sinners would be – before his own faith was shaken and his right-wing Romanticism (like Victor Hugo’s) again turned into aggression against the Roman Catholic Church after 1830. Both Byron’s Manfred and Polidori’s Ernestus Berchtold are lost in the immensity of the Alps, without a church to save them or a guide to show them their way. To them, Alpine sublimity is – in Ann Radcliffe’s definition – horror rather than terror, threatening them with undeserved destruction. But, as in Christian theology, the ideal of Christ is not to be reached by mortals – not even by the saints – so is the ideal of Prometheus in Negative Romanticism out of reach to even the Byronic heroes. Mortal man must commit the sin or folly of nourishing false hopes, again and again, because his invincible passions do not allow him to ever attain to the ideal of imperturbability. He is thus condemned not to be able to obey the call of the crucified Prometheus of his own free will, as exemplified in the case of Napoleon’s indocility : Hear! hear! Prometheus from his rock appeal To earth, air, ocean, all that felt or feel His power and glory, all who yet shall hear A name eternal as the rolling year; He teaches them the lesson taught so long, So oft, so vainly – learn to do no wrong.499

The Byronic hero was Byron’s self-fashioning, as in his description of ConradLara: aloof, alien, mysterious, “a stranger in this breathing world” suffering from a “madness not of the head, but heart”.500 Lara is so evasive and contradictory that the reader gets a lot of information about him, but nothing is really known in the sense of Byron’s increasing scepticism and denial of a fixed identity.501 The bisexual overtones in Lara’s feeling of guilt and in his devotion to his page Kaled (in reality Gulnare crossdressed) are, however, unmistakeable.502 Little wonder that the Byron pose of heroic pessimism – like the Werther pose before – became fashionable with young men all over Europe, showing their denial of themselves to established rule, even if they did not share Byron’s fundamental Pyrrhonism. The Byronic extravagances of Les Jeunes-France (around 1830, the year of the July and Hernani Revolutions), Th8ophile Gautier, G8rard de Nerval, P8trus 499 Byron, The Age of Bronze, 1823, lines 227–232. The idea is that the few “sages” did not obey Prometheus either, but had the good luck that their vanity drove them into a better direction. 500 Byron, Lara, 1814, 1. 315 and 358. 501 Emily A. Bernhard Jackson, The Development of Byron’s Philosophy of Knowledge: Certain in Uncertainty, 81–102. 502 Louis Crompton, Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in 19th-Century England, London 1985, 206–210.

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Borel, may serve as an example.503 French Byronism was largely a rebellious positioning derived from rumours and a selective reading of Am8d8e Pichot’s uninspired French prose translation (1819–1821) rather than of Galignani’s English edition (1818–1824), and Pichot was the source of most European Byronism, French being much more widely read than English. This kind of histrionic reception is well documented in a complaint by Etienne B8quet, writing around 1830: La d8solation est vraiment sur notre Parnasse: c’est / qui se cr8era des chagrins, inventera des afflictions. Celui-ci est orphelin, celui-l/ est proscrit, cette autre est parricide. Les plus mod8r8s se contentent de tuer r8guliHrement tous les mois leurs ma%tresses, afin de r8pandre sur sa tombe des larmes et des vers.504

Dandyism, the self-fashioning of artists on the model of Lord Byron and George “Beau” Brummell, was another part of that Promethean pose. Pride, arrogance, elitism, aristocratic disdain of the crowd, egocentricity, aloofness, extravagance, social nonconformity, indifference to social reality, horror of the trivial, the normal, the usual, and day-to-day life, and the cult of noble anger or disdainful coldness505 were all strategies of protest, preparing the Decadence and related to modern tragicomedy. That in itself originated from the breakdown of the originally integrative Romantic Irony into its constituent parts as analysed above – belief and doubt, comedy and tragedy – so that typically comic plots ended in tragedy. Grabbe’s Don Juan und Faust (1829) and Musset’s On ne badine pas avec l’amour (1834) have been adduced as examples.506 Here, the reaction to the world’s chaos was a mixture of tears and laughter that deviated from the Classical Tradition. The laughter creates distance yet gets stuck in men’s throats; it defies all rules and order and provides no relief, as later in the plays of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. In Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, it is the mad cheer of the mariners on a sinking ship who despair of salvation.507 And in Poe’s “The Raven”, it is the smile of a desperately depressed speaker, struck by the odd appearance of the uncanny mythical bird, with its shaven crown, sitting solemnly on top of the bust of solemn Pallas and declaring total, hellish negation. Creative doubt and disillusioned irony, not orderly Wordsworthian “despondency corrected”, elevated Byron, Poe, Leopardi, Heine, Grabbe, Musset, and 503 G. Hoffmeister, Byron und der europäische Byronismus, 75–76. 504 Quoted from: Edmond EstHve, Byron et le romantisme franÅais, Paris 1907, 168. Also see Joanne Wilkes, “Infernal Magnetism”: Byron and Nineteenth-Century French Readers, in: The Reception of Byron in Europe, ed. Richard Cardwell, London 2004, I. 11–31. 505 H. Gnüg, Kult der Kälte, Stuttgart 1988, and S. Neumeister, Der Dichter als Dandy, Munich 1973. 506 V. Nemoianu, The Taming of Romanticism, Romantic Irony and Biedermeier Tragicomedy, 161–193. Nemoianu refers to K.S. Guthke, Modern Tragicomedy. 507 Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 3. 16. 6–9.

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Baudelaire above mere bleak despair, providing an antidote against their mal du siHcle.508 Baudelaire’s groundbreaking essay De l’essence du rire (1855, 1857) explained laughter as a manifestation of the diabolical part of fallen man, a reaction to the daily shock and pain under which he laboured in his middle position between the infinite grandeur above and the infinite misery below him, symbolized by the myths of heaven and hell. It was a subversive adoption of the doctrine of the middle state of man as taught in Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man (1733–1734): “C’est du choc perpetuel de ces deux infinis que se d8gage le rire. Le comique, la puissance du rire est dans le rieur et nullement dans l’objet du rire”.509 In Baudelaire’s view, himself a dandy and artist that had self-fashioned akin to the last flicker of the setting sun in a decadent age of democracy, the maledictions and blasphemies of artists as poHtes maudits and grands abandonn8s related them to the Byronic hero, accepting hopelessness, asserting the dignity of man by ostentatious disrespect for the unjust but invincible Creator of the world: Car c’est vraiment, Seigneur, le meilleur t8moignage Que nous puissions donner de notre dignit8 Que cet ardent sanglot qui roule d’.ge en .ge Et vient mourir au bord de votre 8ternit8!510

The Promethean dignity of suffering man is the major theme of Leopardi’s poem La ginestra o il fiore del deserto (1836). Here, the furze is set as being an example to man, preceded by an epigraph that perverts a quotation from the Gospel of St John:511 men loved the darkness better than the light (here meaning that men lost their dignity by loving the mystification of the church better than the light of their own reason). The furze is content with its poor, confined existence growing on narrow plots of arid ground and threatened by Mount Vesuvius above. It seeks neither theodicy nor individuality nor liberty, refusing to boast kinship with eternity, but bears in patience and defiance its unchosen, fortuitous destiny which it can neither change nor palliate. As it is easier to bear one’s burden in a community, the furze huddles and clings together, without, however, theologizing its community into an 1jjkgs_a – a thought resumed in Schopenhauer’s ethics of compassion (“Mitleid” in the sense of “Mitleiden”) as an inversion of the Christian cardinal virtue of caritas (“Menschenliebe”).512 We must love and 508 K. Weinberg, Henri Heine, “romantique d8froqu8”, h8raut du symbolisme franÅais, 137. A well-known statement of mal du siHcle is contained in the second chapter of Musset’s semiautobiographical novel Confession d’un enfant du siHcle (1836). 509 Baudelaire, De l’essence du rire, 1855, 1857, in: Œuvres complHtes, 982. 510 Baudelaire, Les fleurs du mal, Les phares, lines 41–44, ed. cit. 14. 511 John 3, 19. 512 Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, ed. cit. II. 804.

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support each other because there is no benevolent God. Thus a mere plant, Leopardi’s furze, is wiser than man who, relapsed from the Enlightenment to Romanticism, from adulthood to childhood, debases himself to a cowardly renewal of comfortable self-deception, misnaming his regression progress: Qui mira e qui ti specchia, Secol superbo e sciocco, Che il calle insino allora Dal risorto pensier segnato innanti Abbandonasti, e volti addietro i passi, Del ritornar ti vanti, E proceder il chiami.513

By contrast, the furze neither pays homage to Vesuvius nor the earth, nor exalts itself from its native soil to the stars, nor laments its fate nor tries to basely escape it by suicide, but bears its existence with Promethean dignity : Ma non piegato insino allora indarno Codardamente supplicando innanzi Al futuro oppressor ; man non eretto Con forsennato orgoglio inver le stelle, NH sul deserto, dove E la sede e i natali Non per voler ma per fortuna avesti.514

This admiration for the non-human creation’s joyful acceptance of fate recurs both in the philosophy of Nietzsche and the poetry of Thomas Hardy. Hardy’s poems on birds, “Proud Songsters” and “The Blinded Bird”, discredit the Positive Romantic use of birds as a symbol for the poet, but envy them for their rhythmic continuation of their joyful song in spite of their suffering and brevity of life. They neither complain nor console themselves with systems of theodicy.515 Fitzgerald’s Omar Khayy#m argues much in the same way, though his stress is on unrestricted joy rather than proud or stoic suffering. Prayers are useless, because a heaven behind the sky is not visible, and imploring the visible sky for protection is absurd because all material creation obeys the same iron law of necessity. Life’s and destiny’s contingencies must be borne: And that inverted Bowl we call The Sky Whereunder crawling coop’d we live and die, 513 Leopardi, La ginestra, 1836, lines 52–58, in: Tutte le opere, I. 42. 514 Ibid. lines 307–313, ed. cit. I. 45. 515 Paul Goetsch, Thomas Hardy’s Poems on Composition and Inspiration, in: Motifs and Themes in Modern British and American Poetry, 221.

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Lift not your hands to It for help – for It As impotently moves as you or I.516

In his French years, slowly dying in his Matratzengruft, Heine ironically fashioned himself as a disease-stricken Job, though he replaced Job’s resignation to God’s purposeful will with Prometheus’s jibes at his heavenly tormentor’s impotence. God, the celestial Aristophanes and creator of the world’s sarcastic comedy, torments Heine, the earthly Aristophanes and sarcastic alter deus, with a prolonged, painful disease. Heine’s ironic knee-bending to and scoffing at the divine, self-plagiarizing sadist’s boring torture enacts the pose of Prometheus and the Byronic hero. After Byron’s death, Heine had begun to conceive of himself as Byron’s heir – a “cousin” with a spirit too like himself – the only human being to whom he felt related:517 Demütig erkenne ich seine [Gottes des Spötters] Überlegenheit, und ich beuge mich vor ihm im Staube. Aber wenn es mir auch an solcher höchsten Schöpfungskraft fehlt, so blitzt doch in meinem Geiste die ewige Vernunft, und ich darf sogar den Spaß Gottes vor ihr Forum ziehen und einer ehrfurchtsvollen Kritik unterwerfen. Und da wage ich zunächst die untertänigste Andeutung auszusprechen, es wolle mich bedünken, als zöge sich jener grausame Spaß, womit der Meister den armen Schüler heimsucht, etwas zu sehr in die Länge; er dauert schon über sechs Jahre, was nachgerade langweilig wird. Dann möchte ich ebenfalls mir die unmaßgebliche Bemerkung erlauben, daß jener Spaß nicht neu ist und daß ihn der große Aristophanes des Himmels schon bei einer andern Gelegenheit angebracht, also ein Plagiat an hoch sich selber begangen habe.518

In the autumn of 1818, during a visit from Lucca to Venice, Percy Shelley accompanied Byron on a ride on the Lido. The conversation, which continued into the small hours of the morning in Byron’s Palazzo Mocenigo, inspired Shelley’s conversation-poem Julian and Maddalo, composed from memory during his first stay at I Capuccini, Byron’s villa in Este.519 Far from being a faithful literary record of the real conversation, Shelley’s self-fashioning and his contrastive fashioning of Byron are evident. In the literary work, he concentrated the views of Positive and Negative Romanticism in a set of opposite articles of faith, Concerning God, freewill and destiny, Of all that earth has been or yet may be.520 516 Fitzgerald, Rub#iy#t of Omar Khayy#m, 1859, stanza 72 (first edition), ed. cit. 263. 517 Documentation in the commentary to Heine, Sämtliche Schriften, IV. 937–938, and Siegbert Salomon Prawer, Frankenstein’s Island: England and the English in the Writings of Heinrich Heine, Cambridge 1986, 24–25. 518 Heine, Geständnisse, 1854, in: Sämtliche Schriften, VI. I. 499–500. Note the ironic register and vocabulary of a subject’s deference to his sovereign. 519 Marchand, Byron: A Portrait, 286. 520 P.B. Shelley, Julian and Maddalo: A Conversation, MS 1818–1819, lines 42–43, publ. posth. 1824, in: Poetical Works, 191.

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Here, both poets are heterodox infidels in terms of established religions.521 However, Julian-Shelley, the so-called “atheist”, is a sceptically optimistic Pagan Platonist, whereas the so-called “maniac” Maddalo-Byron is a pessimistic sceptic and Pyrrhonist, the mouthpiece of Negative Romanticism.522 JulianShelley stands in positive Promethean expectation of victory and a better world, notwithstanding his hidden doubts of his Platonism due to his early admiration of the French materialist philosophers: ‘We are assured Much may be conquered, much may be endured, Of what degrades and crushes us. We know That we have power over ourselves to do And suffer – what, we know not till we try ; But something nobler than to live and die – So taught those kings of old philosophy Who reigned, before Religion made men blind; And those who suffer with their suffering kind Yet feel their faith, religion.’523

Julian-Shelley shares Blake’s optimism concerning tyranny as a reversible consequence of man’s “mind-forged manacles”.524 Promethean strength of mind will prevail over the social and moral conventions imposed by churches and states, and all tyranny will collapse. Julian-Shelley also anticipates Ralph Waldo Emerson’s optimism concerning liberated man’s unlimited possibilities: ‘[…] it is our will That thus enchains us to permitted ill – We might be otherwise – we might be all We dream of happy, high, majestical.’525

Maddalo-Byron’s answer, “You talk Utopia”, proceeds from a contrary view of the nature of man, one characterized by weakness of will and vanity in aspira521 P.B. Shelley’s Preface, 189–190. 522 The allegation of madness, in context with the Byrons’ family history, was made by Byron’s divorced wife Annabella Milbanke Byron. The allegation of atheism goes back to P.B. Shelley’s early treatise The Necessity of Atheism (1811, 1813), where ‘atheism’ meant the heterodoxy of the anti-Christian Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate (AD 361–363) as well as the Enlightenment empiricism of La Mettrie, Helv8tius, d’Holbach, d’Alembert, and Diderot; also see M. Priestman, Romantic Atheism, Cambridge 1999. 523 P.B. Shelley, Julian and Maddalo, lines 182–191. Note Shelley’s Blakean distinction between non-established, soul-felt “religion” and established “Religion”. 524 Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience, London, 1795, line 8. Also see D. Tandecki, Mind-Forg’d Manacles: William Blake und das Moralgesetz, Frankfurt am Main and Berne 1987. 525 P.B. Shelley, Julian and Maddalo, lines 170–173. Emerson made a similar distinction between “religions” and “Religion”.

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tions. His introducing Julian-Shelley to a maniac in a mental asylum, a man allegedly turned mad with such “vain […] aspiring theories”, only proves himself wrong. Utopia, though unrealistic, appears as a safeguard against madness and despair. The maniac had been driven insane with disappointed love, for want of such a positive theory to support him, though a self-delusion. Julian-Shelley, the sceptical optimist, does not give up the hope of finding an entrance to the caverns of his friend’s mind, thereby safeguarding him against similar madness and acting to “reclaim him from his dark estate”.526 However, he would not succeed; quite the contrary was to happen. Both the central position of the maniac’s long speech of unrelieved despair and the poem’s open end show how Percy Shelley himself was infected by Byron’s Negative Romanticism. Maddalo-Byron and the maniac appear as Julian-Shelley’s doppelgangers, radical manifestations of the dark reverse side, the doubt accompanying his Positive Romanticism.527 Shelley felt deeply depressed after the death of his daughter Clara on his second visit to Byron’s Palazzo Mocenigo, as well as by the ensuing estrangement from his wife Mary, whereas Byron was in one of his high moods of literary and erotic activity. Shelley, however, clung to his Platonic optimism, combating his depression with visions of happy isles in the sea of ruin and an ultimate brotherhood of man, even as Byron continued to preach his gospel of Romantic Disillusionism. Shelley’s “Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills” (MS October 1818) features a speaker who approaches Byron’s view of a pilgrimage or cruise of life that is fuelled by constant expectations of better shores and moods – realities and promises to Shelley, illusions to Byron. Unlike the earlier Julian and Maddalo, however, this speaker has two distinct voices – anticipating Alfred Lord Tennyson – one of darkness, despair, and deep depression, and another of erupting light, hope, and joy for himself and his family, for renascent Italy, and for mankind to be restored to freedom, peace, and equality. Here, the Pyrrhonian Byronic voice is the Platonist Shelley’s dark doppelganger. Shelley’s Positive Romanticism is still victorious at the end of “Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills”, but has been shaken by a subversive voice from the caverns of the unconscious below, one that was destined to overwhelm the poet at the end of his life. The specifically Romantic doppelganger motif had psychologized and demonized the earlier alter ego and doppelganger as a consequence of the growing awareness of man’s split personality and the universal Weltriss, as shown above. 526 Ibid. lines 567–574. 527 G.M. Matthews, Julian and Maddalo: The Draft and the Meaning, in: Studia Neophilologica, 35 (1963), 75–84, and Rosa Karl, Paradoxe Paradiesschöpfung: Untersuchung zu einer Ethik und Rhetorik des Un-Vernünftigen in den Texten Percy Bysshe Shelleys, Trier 2011, 124.

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Classical mythology, with its irremediably split Olympus constantly at war, was interpreted as symbolizing this Weltriss, where contraries would never be balanced or reconciled. The conscious and the unconscious, the id and the superego (so named by Sigmund Freud later), public and private demands, and male and female would forever be at odds. Beside “Weltriss”, “Tragik” was a nineteenthcentury German neologism denoting the fatal inescapability of man’s guilt and Fall, as in the tragedies of Lord Byron, Heinrich von Kleist, and Franz Grillparzer. The assumption of such a “split world”528 was the result of Romantic introspection and the consequent invention of psychoanalysis. Thus, Kleist’s Penthesilea, the titular heroine of one of his tragedies who is split between extreme sensibility and extreme cruelty like her beloved Achilles, is the double of his Käthchen von Heilbronn, the titular heroine of his simultaneously written fairy-tale drama of medieval chivalry (MSS 1807–1808). Kleist himself attested to this view of postlapsarian human nature when he called his imaginatively idealized Käthchen “die Kehrseite der Penthesilea, ihr andrer Pol”.529 Only on a fantastical level could the tragic conflict between public and private demands – as well as between dreaming and waking – be solved. Realistically, Kleist’s split characters mirror the nature of an antagonistically split and rationally inexplicable world, to which no superordinate unity can provide any sense or aim. Doppelgangers could appear as separate characters in several works of an author, as separate characters in the same work, as men or animals or portraits, or as ghosts and dream visions. Poe’s fiendish, murderous orang-utan is thus the doppelganger of the respectable citizens of Paris, including Auguste Dupin,530 just as, later, the criminals and rebels in the novels of Charles Dickens have been interpreted as the respectable author’s doubles.531 Thus, Poe’s Roderick and Madeline Usher, each other’s doppelganger, cannot survive without one other. Reintegration is possible only in death, when their symbolically decadent house collapses together with their decadent bodies.532 Thus, Poe’s William Wilson with his doppelganger – like Melville’s Captain Ahab with his white whale, or Sheridan Le Fanu’s Reverend Jennings with his vicious black monkey, or Wilde’s Dorian Gray with his picture – fails in his attempt at integrating or destroying his other, shadowy, doggedly following, antithetical half, representing desire (Freud’s id) or conscience (Freud’s superego) respectively. It is only in death that 528 Davidson, Poe: A Critical Study, 52. 529 Kleist, Letter to Marie von Kleist, late autumn 1807, in: Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, IV. 398. 530 Poe, Tales of Mystery and Imagination, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, 1841, in: Collected Works, II. 553–568. 531 Edmund Wilson, The Wound and the Bow : Seven Studies in Literature, Dickens: The Two Scrooges, London 1952, 1–93. 532 Poe, Tales of Mystery and Imagination, The Fall of the House of Usher, 1839, 1840, in: Collected Works, II. 416–417.

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the id and the superego can be reconciled. The aestheticist ideal and design for life cannot work in practice. The vulgar pseudonym of William Wilson, quite unusual for an aristocratic narrator, denotes the universal validity of this view of man533 as reflected in the bipartite and heterogeneous nature of both the principal and the Elizabethan school house. The principal is alternately a rodwielding tyrant in the schoolroom and a benevolent preacher in the pulpit. The school-house is a narrow, stifling structure, yet is replete with endlessly irregular and unfathomable mazes, arabesque windings and subdivisions typifying the unconscious within the small circumference of man. It has two similar, though separate, storeys, so that the students find it difficult to say where they are, and it has two radically different gardens: a bleak playground to the rear and a beautiful garden with parterres de broderie at the front. Unlike an Elizabethan labyrinth, however, this chaotic maze has neither a centre, nor a plan, nor any possibility of orientation. It stands for a creation and reality not to be grasped; an ever elusive hoax. This Verlust der Mitte thus also symbolized Romantic Disillusionism’s doubt about order, aim, and purpose – a loss experienced by the later Keats and Percy Shelley under the impression of their approaching deaths. Negative Romanticism was always present to threaten the Platonism of a physician acquainted with life’s misery when facing his own dissolution: John Keats. Keats came to better appreciate Byron when, after July 1819, he read the first two cantos of Don Juan. He had begun his poetical career by admiring and studying the serious romantic allegory of Spenser’s Fairy Queen, and he closed it with a parody of both Spenser’s idealism and style. His unfinished The Cap and Bells, or, The Jealousies (MS Nov.-Dec. 1819) is a comic allegorical fairy tale which replaces Spenser’s virtuous heroes and ladies with childish, pampered, tyrannical, and vicious courtiers. On an allegorical level, readers could easily identify the rotten modern court (instead of Spenser’s ideal fairy court), and lust, jealousy, rage, and tyranny (instead of Spenser’s Aristotelian virtues). Platonism becomes a butt of ridicule – the real and the ideal are no longer compatible. Prince Elfinan of fairy land despises spiritual love and has an irregular appetite for solid, young, smooth, mortal female flesh, a natural vice which neither the religion nor the priesthood of fairy land can cure. He stands for the promiscuous, small, fat Prince Regent, later King George IV. Bellanaine, his fairy wife from another fairy land to whom he is married by political convention, also prefers fleshly, mortal lovers. She stands for the Prince Regent’s German wife, the equally promiscuous and small Caroline of Brunswick. Both are portrayed as they were in innumerable contemporary political caricatures. Elfinan is a mixture of pampered boy and oriental tyrant, simultaneously cruel 533 Poe, Tales of Mystery and Imagination, William Wilson, 1839, 1840, II. 431. Also see Günther Ahrends, Die amerikanische Kurzgeschichte, Stuttgart 1980, 88.

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and ridiculous as in eighteenth-century literary orientalism. Bellanaine is a luxury-loving, wayward, ever-discontented aristocratic girl. And their courtiers and politicians are a gallery of fools or knaves. Thus, Keats’s elevated and serious Spenserian style, together with his Spenserian stanza, stands in parodic contrast to his low and comic epic plot: the ancien r8gime restored or confirmed by the Congress of Vienna is a madhouse of lust and jealousy. Trivial allusions to contemporary events, such as the introduction of dim gas lighting in London around 1807, mock-heroic descriptions of trivial things, such as rotten London hackney-coaches, mock-heroic descriptions of petty heraldry and staged processions of state, with paid subjects cheering for money, or the representation of a noble Chaldean magician (Hum) as a drunk royal pimp serve the parody’s social criticism. Keats’s sloppy and bathetic meta-narrative digressions in “careless rhyme”,534 modelled on Byron’s Don Juan, underscore the epic’s philosophical and political subversion: But let us leave this idle tittle-tattle, To waiting-maids and bedroom coteries, Nor till fit time against her [Bellanaine’s] fame wage battle. Poor Elfinan is very ill at ease – Let us resume his subject if you please: For it may comfort and console him much To rhyme and syllable his miseries. Poor Elfinan, whose cruel fate was such, He sat and cursed his bride he knew he could not touch!535

The poem concludes with a manuscript fiction, the narrator’s verse version of Crafticant’s prose record of the fairy state’s final apocalyptic collapse. The fictitious manuscript, over which its author died in the act of writing, suggests historical veracity : the ancien r8gime will dissolve in chaos, but there is no indication of millennial regeneration. Cosmic omens announce an apocalyptic catastrophe, and the strict order of a hypocritical ceremonial festivity in honour of Bellanaine dissolves in primordial chaos: […] A row Of lords and ladies, on each hand, make show Submissive of knee-bending obeisance, All down the steps; and, as we entered, lo! The strangest sight, the most unlooked-for chance, All things turned topsy-turvy in a devil’s dance.536

534 Keats, The Cap and Bells, or, The Jealousies, MS 1819, line 636, in: Poems, 731. 535 Ibid. lines 118–126, ed. cit. 708. 536 Ibid. lines 751–756, ed. cit. 735.

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Keats’s and Percy Shelley’s final scepticism and disillusionment is worth noting, though readers still tend to prefer both poets’ earlier, affirmative works. Towards the end of his short life, in a fragment of the last poem on which he was nervously engaged shortly before his tragic death in the Tyrrhenian Sea, Percy Shelley finally yielded his Positive Romanticism, which had still informed his epicedium on the death of John Keats in 1821537, to Byron’s Romantic Disillusionism. Shelley’s The Triumph of Life must therefore be read as a palinode or recantation, an elegiac pendant to Keats’s satirical The Cap and Bells, both poems are committed to the ever-present reverse of Platonic Romanticism. The Triumph of Life is a Dantesque dream allegory that employs the favourite technical-rhetorical device of Negative Romanticism: bathos or deflation or bubble-pricking. Instead of an anamnetic Platonic-Romantic dream revealing the truth of the beautiful world beyond as man’s ultimate origin and destination, this Negative Romantic dream reveals only the inescapable misery of life in this world. As in the poetry of Leopardi and Baudelaire – or in Byron’s famous allegorical poem “The Dream” (1816) and Felicia Hemans’s more moderate companion poem “The Dream of Life” (1830) – associations of the resurrection and Paradise Regained are raised only to be shattered and discredited: the carrion remains carrion, the dead appearing in the hues of life remain dead, the sunken treasures remain buried at the bottom of the sea, the paradisiacal island turns out to be a place of death. Entropically, the truth of dreams is reduced into insights into the truth of the human predicament. The title and introductory stanzas538 of Percy Shelley’s poem evoke expectations of regeneration: religious faith, life triumphing over death, light over darkness. The poem’s Dantesque form, a Christian vision in terza rima, evokes expectations of dialectical ascent from Hell via Purgatory to Paradise, as in Dante’s Divina Commedia. But Life turns out to be Death-in-Life, dragging down all human hope vanquished in a triumphal procession, and the scene remains a terrestrial hell without any glimpses of Purgatory or Paradise. Similarly, and later, Beddoes’s Death’s Jest-Book shows the joyous dance of life that all would join as a danse macabre. False hopes and high expectations are raised; Paradise is quoted in order to show the ruins of a Paradise irretrievably Lost. Antithesis is the end of an incomplete dialectic. The promise of a glorious morning with a rising sun is shattered by renewed darkness and a foul tempest, with an eerie vision of mad, aimless crowds that act absurdly – cheering a chariot running over and dragging them in an abject 537 P.B. Shelley, Adonais, MS June 1821. The very title-reference to the Adonis-Thammuz cult of the Phoenicians implies death and resurrection. 538 P.B. Shelley, The Triumph of Life, MS 1822, publ. posth. 1824, lines 1–40. 40 is the number of years the Israelites wandered lost in the wilderness, before regaining the promised land. This, as the allusion to Trionfi, Petrarch’s terza rima imitation of Dante’s Divina Commedia, raises false expectations of deliverance.

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triumphal procession. This is a parody of the Divine Chariot or 85?LB in the initial vision of the Prophet Ezekiel, as adapted and reshaped in Blake’s Four Zoas (MS 1795–1804), blended with mythological associations of Phaeton’s illfated and fatal sun chariot. Instead of the Bible’s and Blake’s splendid chariot with four radiant creatures set in relief against the tempest, manifesting and obeying the will of a life-giving Deity, Percy Shelley’s speaker has a vision of a “sad pageantry”: a destructive chariot with a four-faced, blindfolded, shadowy charioteer carrying Life as an ugly, all-conquering Deathbringer – a witch delighting in universal destruction. It calls up the image of a hearse incompetently driven by a tragicomic undertaker and pulled by bolting horses. The idea is clearly Byronic. Death-in-Life’s procession drags in triumph all those who grew old in vain worldly aspirations, irrespective of good or evil: All those whose fame or infamy must grow Till the great winter lay the form and name Of their own earth with them forever low, –

They also lacked the luck or courage to die young, like Keats, or to renounce all earthly aspirations, like Socrates and Jesus.539 The scene characterizes this world as a chaotic inferno. Hell is no place beyond, but the conditio humana. It is darkened by dim phantoms, bats, apes, vultures, demon-wings, discoloured flakes of snow, and grotesque creatures with dead eyes. As in the shipwreck scene of Byron’s Don Juan, men are panicking animals or maniacs lacking all selfcontrol, acting contrary to all reason. Cheering their conqueror’s advance “with fierce song and maniac dance”, mixing “with each other in tempestuous measure To savage music”, “tortured by […] agonizing pleasure” they reel to their deaths, “like moths by light attracted and repelled”.540 The scene thus anticipates the mad revelations in Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death” (1842), and also the negation of a human nature separate from the bestial in Büchner’s domestic tragedy Woyzeck (4 MSS 1835–37), where men and animals appear as educated by the same acts of dressage,541 a thin layer of artificial cultivation dissolving into original, natural chaos at any moment of stress. Man will then obey his anarchic nature rather than culture. Social cohesion and Christian community are shown to break, revealing the truth beneath the painted veil – a mutual non-understanding and war that pits everybody versus everybody else. In Büchner’s play, the allegedly “natural” ties and “moral” obligations between mother and child, 539 P.B. Shelley, ibid. lines 120–137. 540 Ibid. lines 149–54, together with lines 254–9, formulate Shelley’s final Byronic view of l’amour fatal, revoking Epipsychidion (MS 1821), his earlier plea for free love as a weapon to overcome tyranny. 541 Büchner, Woyzeck, I, in: Sämtliche Werke, 158 (Der Budenbesitzer ein Pferd vorführend). Note the pun “Viehsionomik” with its implicit satire on Lavater.

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father and mother, physician and patient, officer and soldier, preacher and churchgoer are all rent into chaos and brutality, and thus given the lie. Every single character of the play launches out on an isolated, blind, and vain search for a sustaining, positive philosophy of life. False hopes of social cohesion and religious meaning are quoted to be entropically discredited. In Percy Shelley’s The Triumph of Life, the device of baffled hope is mirrored in the long final speech of the entranced speaker’s guide, the old and mad Rousseau, who replaces the clear-sighted Virgil in Dante. However, where Virgil answered Dante’s questions concerning the world and human life, Rousseau has nothing to offer to Shelley’s Dantesque questions except ignorance and oblivion. Lethe and nepenthe have taken the place of Platonic anamnesis and Wordsworthian recollection, and bubbles of a mad brain have replaced Blakean mantic visions. Following a false promise of regeneration in April, “A shape all light”,542 Wordsworthian Nature had approached Rousseau with the false Wordsworthian promise that “Nature never did betray The heart that loved her”.543 But she had proved a femme fatale that would forever betray the heart that loved her. She resembles Byron’s ignes fatui and will-o’-the-wisps, luring men into bogs and deserts. Her expected invigorating Eucharist had been perverted into a cup of debilitating, brain-sterilizing poison: ‘I rose; and, bending at her sweet command, Touched with faint lips the cup she raised, And suddenly my brain became as sand.’544

Percy Shelley’s choice of Rousseau, the primitivist and head of the Romantic School, as guide to his speaker was doubly functional. Rousseau, who went mad with suffering what he wrote,545 points out the fate of representatives of the Enlightenment, whose cult of reason provided no more protection than his own cult of feeling and the imagination: Voltaire, Frederick of Prussia, Immanuel Kant, Catherine of Russia, Leopold of Austria – all “spoilers spoiled”.546 The idea is again Byronic, a recantation of Percy Shelley’s earlier belief in the omnipotence of mind, anticipating absurd views of man and the world. The passions are not subject to control by reason, thus, “power & will In opposition rule our mortal day”, as God “made irreconcilable Good & the means to Good”.547 All men and women, not only avowed Romantics, as well as all tyrants, subjects, and 542 P.B. Shelley, The Triumph of Life, line 352. After the poem’s introductory stanzas, this is the second false promise of regeneration, with a perverted reverdie. 543 Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey, 1798, lines 122–123. 544 P.B. Shelley, The Triumph of Life, lines 403–405. 545 Ibid. line 279. 546 Ibid. lines 234–243. 547 Ibid. lines 228–231. For the later development of that idea in philosophy and literature see K.S. Guthke, Modern Tragicomedy, New York 1966.

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victims experience alike that “impotence of will”, symbolized in their being wheeled and whirled to their common deaths. This parallels Byron’s frequent portraits of Napoleon, who, while irresistibly driven to tread on the corpses of millions, was simultaneously and necessarily treading on his own. How radically Percy Shelley finally endorsed Byron’s Romantic Disillusionism appears from a comparison of his subversion of Dante with Byron’s. Byron’s The Prophecy of Dante (MS 1819), provocatively dedicated to his concubine Teresa Guiccioli in a sonnet, is a dramatic monologue that unmasks the speaker as a vengeful and passionate heretic rather than pious and humble believer; a poHte maudit and grand abandonn8 pointing to Fin-de-SiHcle Decadence. The monologue’s “imitative rhyme”,548 terza rima, is so broken by its syntax as to make it hardly recognizable. We experience an old man who, instead of rising to visions of Paradise, descends to Hell and the reality of his life: the loss of his beloved Beatrice and banishment from his native Florence. Christian resignation to the will of God – acceptance of his cross – is an aim that he cannot reach because his passions are as uncontrollable as all mankind’s. In his hysterica passio he resembles Shakespeare’s King Lear, another slave of passion. Akin to the Promethean Byronic hero, he shares the Byronic hero’s pride and guilt. Even while denying a conqueror’s thirst for blood and martial fame, he sinfully enjoys his prophetic vision of Florence’s downfall: Such are the last infirmities of those Who long have suffer’d more than mortal woe, And yet being mortal still, have no repose But on the pillow of Revenge – Revenge, Who sleeps to dream of blood, and waking glows With the oft-baffled, slakeless thirst of change, When we shall mount again, and they that trod Be trampled on, while Death and At8 range O’er humbled heads and sever’d necks – Great God! Take these thoughts from me – […]549

“Oh Florence! Florence!”550 Unlike the Old Testament prophets who weep over their visions of the destruction of Jerusalem, but also foresee Jerusalem’s and the world’s regeneration, Byron’s Dante is torn between lamentation and vindication, and his vision projects the absurd circle of destruction and rebuilding into the future: FROM out the mass of never dying ill, The Plague, the Prince, the Stranger, and the Sword, 548 Byron, The Prophecy of Dante, Dedication, 1821, line 4. 549 Byron, The Prophecy of Dante, 1. 110–118. 550 Ibid. 1. 60.

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Vials of wrath but emptied to refill And flow again, I cannot all record That crowds on my prophetic eye: […]551

The visionary’s view of his great successors is as negative as his self-fashioning. Petrarch, Ariosto and Tasso are seen as epitomes of suffering mankind, whose genius served only to intensify their suffering. The intensity of their vain and dangerous loves made them miserable – their knowledge increased their misery, and the volcanic lava of their imaginations produced dreams and anodynes without contributing to any progress. Poets are “birds of Paradise”,552 promising no Paradise but dreaming of it all the same. After the ecstasy, the lover and poet would, like a consumer of drugs, relapse into bleak reality all the more desolate, comparable to the volcano’s fire falling back into its original hell: […] the scorch’d mountain, from whose burning breast A temporary torturing flame is wrung, Shines for a night of terror, then repels Its fire back to the hell from whence it sprung, The hell which in its entrails ever dwells.553

Both Byron’s The Prophecy of Dante and Percy Shelley’s The Triumph of Life exemplify the literary technique of disillusion in their titles and ironic intertextual references to Dante. The Prophecy of Dante raises false expectations of a vision of Paradise Regained in a dialectical completion of history, and replaces it with curses, visions of non-improvement, and doubt as to the poet’s soteriological mission. Dante’s “prophecy” is deprived of its religiosity and is sceptically redefined like Childe Harold’s “pilgrimage”: instead of a telos, the reader finds nothing but circles and paradises ultimately lost. The Triumph of Life suggests false expectations of regeneration, life’s dialectical triumph over death, which the poem itself progressively thwarts and inverts: life is dragged down in triumph by ultimate death. Percy Shelley’s poem also perverts Dante’s progress from Hell to Paradise into a contrary movement, from various illusions of Paradise to the final reality of unconquerable Hell and unconquerable death. The same technique was used by James Thomson B.V., whose very pseudonym refers to Percy Shelley. The epigraphs to The City of Dreadful Night (1874) pervert a quotation from old Dante into a quotation from modern Leopardi. Accordingly, an old Romantic quester for Paradise Regained is perverted into a bleeding, sobbing, filthy, pain-ridden creature that “had been a man” and is still seeking its way back “To Eden innocence in Eden’s clime”. It is a lonely search, 551 Ibid. 3. 1–5. 552 Ibid. 3. 169. 553 Ibid. 3. 189–193.

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isolated from all Christian or Romantic community. This anachronistic and degenerated creature will neither learn from personal experience nor from modern philosophy, and so it repeats old clich8s and follows old Christian habits and old Romantic illusions of Paradise, childhood, and innocence regained. This creature is the only human being in the poem with whom the lonely speaker converses, albeit disharmoniously, interrupted by the creature’s unwillingness to really communicate: ‘But I am in the very way at last To find the long-lost broken golden thread Which reunites my present with my past, If you but go your own way.’554

Like a clock without hands or a face, disillusioned man draws his absurd rounds “until run down”.555 Later, in the Theatre of the Absurd, this motif of habitude and indocility is broadly elaborated. Still taught in childhood to be a believer, disillusioned modern man goes on and on and on following aims and principles that he knows are vain or even non-existent – the literary descendant of Byron’s Napoleon, Don Juan, and John Johnson. After her husband’s death, Mary Shelley felt confirmed in the Negative Romanticism of her Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus (MS 1816). An irresponsible demiurge threw his creature-man into an unjust world without expectation of progress by knowledge and science, where every step forward involved one backward. The hope of Paradise Regained that her father William Godwin had expressed in Political Justice (1793) had evaporated; from St Leon (1799) onward Godwin himself wrote dark, Gothic novels. Resourceless and isolated, Mary returned to England with her little son in August 1823, only to find more disappointment. Her rich aristocratic father-in–law, Sir Timothy Shelley of Field Place, proved deaf to her entreaties for support and opposed her plans for the publication of his son’s heretical works. It was the time when news reached England of a plague spreading from Calcutta to the Caspian Sea, raising fears that it might spread further to England, via Constantinople and the Continent. Her three-volume novel The Last Man, begun in 1824 and published in 1826, was written in the wake of her late husband’s ironical Triumph of Life, a dystopian fiction representing the failure of all dialectical hope of Paradise Regained.556 As Mary Shelley’s second science fiction novel after Frankenstein, 554 Thomson B.V., The City of Dreadful Night, XVIII. 49–53, I. 164. 555 Ibid. II. 36, I. 129. For the image of a clock ever-turning in absurd circles or cycles see already, decades earlier, the self-fashioning of the night watchman as the disillusioned speaker of Klingemann, Nachtwachen, 1804–1805, 38. 556 For the personal, emotive motivation of Mary Shelley’s pessimistic novel and her opposition to Malthus’s theory of population see F.J. Stafford, The Last of The Race, 216–231.

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which had subverted all expectations of progress by modern science as taught by the Professors Krempe and Waldman in Ingolstadt, The Last Man shows all progress vitiated by an ecological catastrophe, a secular apocalypse, with allusions to industrial technologies used in the war in the east where the Western powers confronted the Osmanic Empire.557 Situated in England in the late twenty-first century, the novel shows England and all present civilization destroyed by a plague spreading from Constantinople. The east, the origin of salvation in Christian soteriology (ex oriente lux), is perverted into the origin of ultimate death; and the physical as well as inspirational “wind” of Percy’s famous ode, quickening “a new birth” after destruction,558 is anti-dialectically reduced to an exclusively physical vehicle of the lethal plague, making the reader aware of his precarious place in a universe ruled by uncontrollable chance. In contrast to Percy’s ode, the evocation of the wind is desperate; the ocean that killed Percy is a Byronic symbol of all-devouring, ultimate death: Why dost thou howl thus, O wind? […] Alas, what will become of us? It seems as if the giant waves of ocean, and vast arms of the sea, were about to wrench the deep-rooted island from its centre; and cast it, a ruin and a wreck, upon the fields of the Atlantic. What are we, the inhabitants of this globe, least among the many that people infinite space? Our minds embrace infinity ; the visible mechanism of our being is subject to merest accident.559

In the novel’s programmatic Introduction, the first (present-day) narrator describes a fictitious visit to Naples in 1818, the time of the Pisan Circle and the publication of Frankenstein. Narrator and friend (Mary and Percy) happen to find the entrance to the cave of Virgil’s Cumaean Sybil. The darkness, the skeleton, the ruins, and the written fragments from a civilization long dead fascinated the chance visitors and their Romantic sublimity, but did not ignite a Romantic and esemplastic prophet-poet’s Platonic vision of eternal truth, joining the fragments of this world into original, eternal unity. Nor was there any prophetic mission to a people walking in darkness, when the simple guides were left behind and never rejoined. Instead, narrator and companion assumed a position of mere egoistic fascination with the past, when the leaves and fragments of bark covered with hieroglyphs were hastily selected and later reassembled as a puzzle for a very personal, and necessarily incorrect, reconstruction (instead of true vision of the eternal truth of a millennial future). What was fragmentary remained so, and the narrator (with her companion now lost) becomes merely a solitary textual editor instead of a prophet to the people: 557 Michael R. Page, The Literary Imagination from Erasmus Darwin to H.G. Wells: Science, Evolution, and Ecology, Farnham and Burlington VT 2012. 558 P.B. Shelley, Ode to the West Wind, 1820, lines 57–70, 579. 559 M. Shelley, The Last Man, 1826, ed. cit. 230.

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Sometimes I have thought, that, obscure and chaotic as they are, they owe their present form to me, their decipherer […]. Doubtless the leaves of the Cumaean Sybil have suffered distortion and diminution of interest and excellence in my hands. My only excuse for transforming them, is that they were unintelligible in their pristine condition.560

Mary Shelley’s novel disavows all articles of the creed of Positive Romanticism. One of her methods is the inversion of roles. Raymond, in part a portrait of Lord Byron, appears as an egoistic masquerader whose sceptical philosophy, however, is ultimately proved right. By contrast, Adrian, in part a portrait of her husband Percy, appears as a noble, optimistic Platonist whose dialectical philosophy, however, is ultimately proved wrong. The sick, suffering Adrian’s noble, though mistaken, hymn on nature’s and history’s benevolence, as well as on the reintegrative and creative power of the imagination, is an intertextual compound of William Wordsworth, Coleridge, Percy Shelley, and Keats: ‘O happy earth, and happy inhabitants of earth! […] Assuredly a most benignant power built up the majestic fabric we inhabit […] Nor are outward objects alone the receptacles of the Spirit of Good. Look into the mind of man, where wisdom reigns enthroned; where imagination, the painter, with his pencil dipped in hues lovelier than those of the sunset, adorning familiar life with glowing tints. What a noble boon, worthy the giver, is the imagination! […] The choice is with us; let us will it, and our habitation becomes a paradise! […]’561

However, imagination, the recreator of Paradise, proves to be its very contrary : the bringer of death. Adrian’s hope will not conquer his and the world’s disease. Perdita’s strong imagination accelerates her premature death by drowning. Unlike Shakespeare’s Perdita in The Winter’s Tale, there will be no resurrection for her, and the strong imagination of her brother Lionel Verney, the first-person narrator, will not realize his delusional hope that the last survivors might be able to reconstitute the human race. Lionel, the “last man”, will perish together with his civilization. Far from being a Keatsian transition into the eternal world beyond this life’s “dome of many-coloured glass”,562 disease and death and annihilation have the last word. It is little wonder that such catastrophism haunted the imagination of poets and painters in an age when all traditional order seemed to collapse, as seen in J.M.W. Turner’s The Deluge (1805, 1828) and John Martin’s The Day of His Wrath (1851–1853) in the Tate Gallery. Mary Shelley’s position is aggressively anti-Platonic in unison with (though stylistically more serious than) Byron, who ridiculed and satirized Plato throughout his work. “Beauty is illusion, illusion beauty”, would have been 560 Ibid. 6–7. 561 Ibid. 74–76. 562 P.B. Shelley, Adonais. An Elegy on the Death of John Keats, MS 1821, line 462, 443.

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Byron’s and the later Shelleys’ substitute for Keats’s famous dictum.563 Platonic jakoj!cah_a taught that all beauty, natural as well as artistic, pointed the reminiscent soul upward to firm, ideal categories of truth and goodness. The Positive Romantic poet recreated nature’s beauty in his lasting works of art, surmounting habitude with originality, in order to make men see beauty anew and to be freshly reminded of the primacy of the soul – nostalgic man’s final home in an ideal world beyond, where his Lost Paradise could be regained. Das Naturschöne, with its symbolism and evanescence, was represented in das Kunstschöne, with its symbolism and terrestrial duration, to lead to a beautiful, ageless eternity. But the reader of late Romantic literature, such as Felicia Hemans’s poem “The Sceptic” (1820), written four years after the Congress of Vienna and in the year of the Peterloo Massacre, will find that nature is no longer seen as beautiful, but as a dark cave from which man must try to escape. The beauty of nature is not expressly denied, but is never affirmed with Wordsworth or Keats. Byron is openly attacked, but secretly admired for his scepticism. More radically, and more demonstratively, the male Negative Romantic poet represented beauty as a mere will-o’-the-wisp; an evanescent and dangerous promise of joy and freshness. Man’s inverted pilgrimage from illusions of beauty and Paradise to awareness of deformity and Paradise Lost is a major theme in Byron’s poetry, the inevitable process of disillusion. Much the same applies to the poetry and prose of Leopardi. In his early prose essay, Discorso di un italiano intorno alla poes&a romantica (MS 1818, 1906), written at the age of 20, Leopardi defined and attacked Romanticism as Positive Romanticism, a mistaken attempt at recovering the naive, imaginative, illusory, and naturally lyrical perception of the world by children and child nations in an early state of civilization.564 Disillusioned by life, adults and adult civilizations have turned from spontaneous poetry to sceptical philosophy, with their long experience of nature as a power indifferent to man. Leopardi’s restriction of “il romanticismo” to Positive Romanticism, especially in Germany, made him see himself as a Neoclassicist adoring Homer, Pindar, Anacreon, and Virgil, whereas in reality he was a Romantic Disillusionist akin to Byron.565 His scepticism grew with his incipient blindness, which aggravated the brooding, physically crippled youth’s isolation in his libraries. Leopardi did not stage his blindness as Homeric or Miltonic introspection enabling the prophet-poet to see metaphysical truth with a keener vision, in the wake of Preromanticism and Positive Romanticism, but cast it as 563 Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn, 1819, line 49, in: Poems, 537: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”. Also see the reference above. 564 Ren8 Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, II. 272–273 and 418–419. 565 In the wake of Leopardi, it is still customary in Italy to mistake Romanticism for a German invention and to restrict it to the Jena Frühromantik. In that warped perspective of literary history, Leopardi and Byron are no Romantics.

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introspection enabling the sceptical philosopher-poet to recognize the vanity of all Platonism and Christianity. Illusion lost is ignorance or innocence lost, and Paradise Lost, antithesis without synthesis. As in Byron, an increase in knowledge does not equal an increase in happiness. Disillusion, rather than prophecy, is also at the core of Mary Shelley’s different treatment of the theme of blindness in The Last Man. Seeking refuge from the plague, Raymond and Adrian cross the Alps in their vain search for regeneration in Rome. Passing through Ferney on their way to Geneva, they find a pious, blind, old man and his sick young daughter, who plays melodies from Haydn’s oratorio Die Schöpfung (1798) on the organ of an empty church. In contrast to the blind Romantic visionary, with his Platonic inward eye, the old man is happy in his blindness because he cannot see the contrast of the piously affirmative oratorio with the reality of things – his dying daughter’s languor and dying mankind’s plague. The daughter’s only happiness consists in continuing her father’s “delusion”.566 This scene uncovers the beauties of religion and art as deceptions, just as the previous scene had unveiled the total indifference and insignificance of the glorious, “heaven-kissing” Alps, Positive Romanticism’s symbol of a connection between this world and an eternal one beyond.567 Here, Heine’s very similar disillusionism readily comes to mind. Heine’s treatise Die romantische Schule (MS 1833, 1836), posing as a supplement to Madame de Sta[l’s De L’Allemagne (1813), was in fact a satirical invective against the Platonism, Christian medievalism, religious devotion, nationalism, and childish primitivism of the German Positive Romantics – the Schlegels, Görres, Brentano, Tieck – and against the obscure philosophy of the German Idealists such as Hegel, including their betrayal of their previous revolutionary ideals. Ludwig Uhland, whose religious superstition and piously affirmative moralizing Heine later satirized by embodying it as the witch’s pug-dog in Atta Troll (MS 1841, 1843), was spared for his adherence to the cause of democracy, and it was from his 1833 rereading of Uhland’s 1813 poems that Heine exemplified his historical, anti-Platonic, and anti-Hegelian critical approach to literature.568 German Idealist philosophy, which Coleridge called “Dynamic Philosophy” for its assumption of a telos and in Romantic contradistinction to Plato’s static world of ideas,569 was given the lie both by its advocates’ and history’s relapses into old patterns. August Wilhelm Schlegel, whom Heine had met as a professor in the newly founded Prussian University of Bonn, had demonstratively assumed all the privileges, vanities, and self-fashioning of a supporter of the ancien 566 567 568 569

M. Shelley, The Last Man, 420–421. Ibid. 418–419. See also McGann, The Romantic Ideology, 49–56. Peter Thorslev, German Romantic Idealism, in: The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, Cambridge 1993, 78.

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r8gime; Hegel, whom he met in the newly founded Prussian University of Berlin, had become a state philosopher ; and Görres had become a state professor of history in Munich, supporting the Roman Catholic Church as sanctifying the divine order and stability of the ancien r8gime. Like Byron’s English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809) and Hints from Horace (MS 1811), Heine’s invective against Positive Romanticism (and the converts to medieval mysticism in particular) takes the Neoclassical stance, weighing the virtues of the predominant French “klassische Kunst”, with its rationality and clarity, against the irrational trivialities of the German “romantische Kunst”.570 Opposition to pious Christian medievalism and spiritualism, as well as to Platonic primitivism, would naturally result in a revaluation of the pagan Classical Tradition. Ludwig Tieck, Heine remarked, brilliantly translated Cervantes’s Don Quijote, the work of a rationalist that should have made him aware of the madness of his “romantische Schule”. Don Quijote and Sancho Panza symbolize ideals and realities, imagination and reason, with realities and reason always relegated and knocked down for their foolish, but irresistible, ideals and imagination. In the view of Heine and Byron, reason and imagination prove incapable of controlling the ever-leading human passions: […] trotz seiner besten Einsicht muß er [Sancho Panza] und sein Esel alles Ungemach teilen, das dem edlen Ritter [Don Quijote] so oft zustößt, ja, die ideale Begeisterung ist von so gewaltig hinreißender Art, daß der reale Verstand, mitsamt seinem Esel, ihr immer wieder folgen muß.571

Die romantische Schule is a manifesto of Romantic Disillusionism, and Heine’s lyrical verse, such as “Götterdämmerung”, should be read in its light. With the title anticipating a favourite motif of the Fin de SiHcle, indicating the end of all things in le grand n8ant, “Götterdämmerung” (1823–1824) stages disillusion on two levels: the fraudulent beauty of the earth and that of the sky. The superficial freshness of the month of May, with its false promise of lasting joy, calls inconsiderate men to celebrate the seemingly revived year, “Das blöde Volk gehorcht dem ersten Ruf”.572 The experienced speaker, however, has come to unmask that mockery. He is no longer a gullible dreamer of Paradise: Zu mir kam auch der Mai. Er klopfte dreimal An meine Tür und rief: Ich bin der Mai, Du bleicher Träumer, komm, ich will dich küssen! Ich hielt verriegelt meine Tür, und rief: Vergebens lockst du mich, du schlimmer Gast. 570 Heine, Die romantische Schule, in: Sämtliche Schriften, III. 366–368. 571 Ibid. III. 431. 572 Heine, Buch der Lieder, Die Heimkehr, Götterdämmerung, 1823–1824, 1827, line 8, ed. cit. I. 150.

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Ich habe dich durchschaut, ich hab durchschaut Den Bau der Welt, ich hab zu viel geschaut, Und viel zu tief, und hin ist alle Freude, Und ewge Qualen zogen in mein Herz.573

Below the deceptive facade, the speaker sees what Joseph Conrad was later to call “The horror”, repeatedly suggesting that reflection unredeemed by activity or enjoyment will prove suicidal.574 The ugly inner truth underneath the beautiful surface reveals a horrid madhouse of ruin, lust, greed, folly, pain, corruption, and, in Conrad’s case, cannibalism. The veneer of beauty and civilization has broken away. Nor does the prophetic speaker’s view upward reveal a better world; the beauty of the firmament, with its twinkling stars, breaks away in a similar vision of the subversive inner truth: […] und knisternd Zerstieben droben alle goldnen Sterne. Mit frecher Hand reißt man den goldnen Vorhang Vom Zelte Gottes, heulend stürzen nieder, Aufs Angesicht, die frommen Engelscharen. Auf seinem Throne sitzt der bleiche Gott, […]575

Earth and sky arose from chaos and fall back into chaos. Their final destination is Paradise Lost, corresponding to illusion lost: Die Säulen brechen, Erd und Himmel stürzen Zusammen, und es herrscht die alte Nacht.576

The ruins of Paradise are the world’s inescapable and irreparable condition. Instead of Platonic, Wordsworthian or Emersonian visions of harmony and correspondence, Paradise Regained, we experience lasting, or even increasing, fragmentation, discontinuity, inconsistency, and confusion. Confronted with the reproach of Byronic rupture, Heine defended himself on the grounds of the disrupted constitution of the world, aggravated by the disconsolate state of things as they were. Here, Heine coined the much-quoted term “der große Weltriß”: Ach, teurer Leser, wenn Du über jene Zerrissenheit klagen willst, so beklage lieber, daß die Welt selbst mitten entzwei gerissen ist. Denn da das Herz des Dichters der Mit573 Ibid. lines 22–30. 574 Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 1899, 1902, in: Collected Edition of the Works, London 1946, VI. 161. The inner truth fully perceived by Kurtz (and only half perceived by the narrator Marlow) corresponds to the inner station. Cf. the French lieutenant’s suicide in Lord Jim (1900). 575 Heine, Götterdämmerung, lines 66–71, ed. cit. I. 151. 576 Ibid. lines 88–89, I. 152.

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telpunkt der Welt ist, so mußte es wohl in jetziger Zeit jämmerlich zerrissen werden. Wer von seinem Herzen rühmt, er sei ganz geblieben, der gesteht nur, daß er ein prosaisch weitabgelegtes Winkelherz hat. Durch das meinige ging aber der große Weltriß, und eben deswegen weiß ich, daß die großen Götter mich vor vielen anderen hoch begnadigt und des Dichtermärtyrtums würdig geachtet haben.577

If, as in Poe’s sceptical cosmology, there ever was an original harmony and unity, it is decomposing itself into increasingly atomistic particles, to the loss of all individuation and identity. Vankirk, the dying mesmerized patient of Poe’s tale “Mesmeric Revelation” (1844), proposes that spirit is unparticled matter, that death converts our rudimentary bodies into perfect bodies, and that hence our souls are immortal. But the speaker and mesmerizer ends his tale questioning whether Vankirk spoke the truth from the region of the dead, or nonsense prompted by a dying man’s confused state of delirium, or wishful thinking from a dying churchgoer’s need of belief in an afterlife.578 Vankirk’s telling name makes a strong case for the third explanation. Moreover, mesmerists had a doubtful reputation concerning their scientific reliability. The narrator and mesmerist of Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (1845) also fails to provide any conclusive proof of the immortality of the soul and the existence of an afterlife. The narrator’s obvious unreliability gives the lie to his claim of the “fact” that Valdemar spoke to him after his physical death.579 The speaker of Poe’s prose-poem Eureka (1848), to which “Mesmeric Revelation” may be read as a prelude, is another religious, unreliable visionary on a frantic search for a world order.580 He subverts his own Positive Romantic assurances both with his repeated ecstatic claims to absolute truth and with his postulation of a nonomnipotent God. His holistic and idiosyncratic philosophy unmasks itself as wishful thinking: that all the separate atoms of the universe, though further and further torn apart and split up into nothingness, are particles of an original, divine unity and will one day regain that divine unity.581 The bleak reality of life, as it was experienced by Poe himself and as it also appears in his poems and tales, does not admit such a consolatory, palliative, and firmly positive faith. Even in Poe’s late poem “The Bells” (MS 1848), written around the same time as Eureka, 577 Heine, Die Bäder von Lucca, 1830, ed. cit. II. 405–406. 578 Poe, Mesmeric Revelation, 1844, in: Collected Works, III. 1029–1040. 579 Poe, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, 1845, III. 1233–43. Also see Link, Edgar Allan Poe, 217–218. 580 G.R. Thompson, Poe’s Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales, 189–191. 581 This reading differs from Daniel Hoffman and Alexander Kupfer, Die künstlichen Paradiese, 539–544, who understand Eureka as Poe’s Positive Romantic creed, in which Poe’s ratiocination (intuition combined with induction and deduction) solves the secrets of the universe as his Dupin’s ratiocination solves the secrets of criminal mystery cases. There is a world of difference between “annihilation” and “effacement” respectively in the works of Poe on the one hand and in the works of the Positive Romantic Victor Hugo on the other.

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harmonious sleigh bells and marriage bells turn into alarm bells and burial knells as their materials, silver and gold, turn into brass and iron. However, this saddening awareness of degeneration, recalling Ovid’s four ages of the world,582 is not relieved by “intimations of immortality”, a synthesis or return to the golden age, Astraea Redux. In contrast to the cosmology of Wordsworth, Coleridge, or Emerson, the torn splinters and particles of this world carry no symbols of transcendence. Nature is no longer readable; symbols have become degraded to mere place markers of a sense they were formerly believed to convey. The poem’s scene thus ends in noise and confusion: clamour, yells, moaning, and groaning, a ghoul-like danse macabre which has lost its homiletic function. And this hellish noise and disharmony is matched by a loss of meaning, the bells becoming merely monotonous automatons, turning their senseless and appalling rounds with hollow habit, ringing on and on and on. The scene of created harmony has been metamorphosed into a scene of wild, primordial Zerrissenheit: Keeping time, time, time, In a sort of Runic rhyme.583

Two years later, in the year of his death (1849), Poe’s short lyric “A Dream Within a Dream” expresses both his and his age’s doubts through a dying speaker, who takes a final farewell of an orthodox believer : “Take this kiss upon the brow!”584 The believer follows the time-honoured Platonic and Christian commonplace of the dream of life, la vida es sueÇo. The speaker, however, on his very death-bed, casts doubt upon the pious commonplace by describing earthly life as possibly a dream within a dream – fantasy squared – in which our wishful thinking imagines a golden, eternal life beyond. Educated as a Christian, the speaker becomes a sceptic rather than a believer in the hour of his death, ending his last speech with a sequence of three questions. The dying Christian’s last words were considered as prophetic and were faithfully recorded to the sound of the passing bells, as revealing a part of truth on the threshold of eternity. But this speaker sees nothing but the Pyrrhonian truth of “scio ut nescio”. The seashore, a traditional image of this threshold to eternity, is roaring and surf-tormented rather than hallowed by harmonious passing bells. The speaker reaches out for a dim fantasy of a golden Heavenly Jerusalem, and finds nothing but sand on the shore of an ocean that is Byronic rather than Christian. Neither will he relinquish his gold and possessions in this world. The ambiguity of his reference to the golden grains of sand diminishing in his hourglass reflects the Pyrrhonism of his final 582 Ovid, Metamorphoses, I. 89–150. 583 Poe, The Bells, 1849, I. 435–438. 584 Poe, A Dream within a Dream, MS 1849, line 1, I. 451.

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despair of belief and insight, his disharmonious Zerrissenheit as the human condition never to be shaken off: O God! can I not grasp Them with a tighter clasp? O God! can I not save One from the pitiless wave? Is all that we see or seem But a dream within a dream?585

In his Byronic tale “The Assignation” (1834), Poe’s intertextual reference to the unreliable narrator’s eye as a “shattered mirror”586 reflecting the world in multiple images recalls Byron, the real person behind the “stranger”, the persona of the tale’s hero embodying a Romantic genius no longer capable of reuniting the fragments of this world. His collection of an odd variety of broken works of art in his Venetian palace corresponds to his alternating moods, fits of depression and fits of laughter – irreconcilable extremes that only his suicide can overcome. The Positive Romantic view of the Romantic genius who, like Blake, can heal the split of time, seeing present, past, and future in one, is additionally destroyed in the second stanza of the tale’s Byronic poem.587 Man’s fallen nature, so often represented in characters of Preromantic and Romantic fiction and drama – all literary prototypes of the Byronic hero588 – stands no longer in a firm hope of salvation. Horace Walpole’s Countess of Narbonne, with her extremes of piety and passion,589 Joanna Baillie’s De Monfort, with his extremes of love and hatred,590 or the father of Mary Shelley’s Matilda, with his contradiction of parental tenderness and unconquerable lust for his daughter – tragic heroines and heroes in their fall – have now become archetypal examples of an irredeemably split, absurd human constitution: the “antithetically mixed”, fractured, multiple, and unstable nature of man. The individual tragic flaw has now become nature’s general chaos. Following the Byronic commonplace,591 Heine described the world’s constitutional chaos in one of his late Matratzengruft poems “Für die Mouche” (Elise Krinitz), “Es träumte mir von einer Sommernacht” (MS 1856). The speaker’s vision deconstructs Renaissance syncretism as well as the Romantic imagination as both were attempts at reconciling opposites and reuniting a split world. Instead of harmony, he sees a higgledy-piggledy meld of grotesque shapes, broken statues, and 585 586 587 588 589 590 591

Ibid. lines 19–24, I. 452. Poe, The Assignation, II. 153. Ibid. II. 162. P.L. Thorslev, The Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes, Minneapolis 1962, passim. Walpole, The Mysterious Mother (1768). Baillie, De Monfort, in: Plays on the Passions, First Series (1798). Gleckner, Byron and the Ruins of Paradise, passim.

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wry-necked caryatids, ridiculous bas-reliefs oddly mixing stupid or cruel biblical scenes with equivalently perverse scenes from classical mythology. The only unity is defined negatively in the speaker’s Byronic reduction of complex things and symbols to their evil components: the invention of printing to black magic, exotic plants and spices to poisons, jewels to colonial spoils, nightingales to rape, and, as in other poems, medicinal passion flowers to torture. The vulgarity and contingency of life will dispel all dreams of unity, like the disparity of cultures, Hellenism and Hebraism (Heine’s sympathies being with Hellenism and the Classical Tradition as opposed to “Nazarene barbarism”). To a large degree, Graf von Platen’s very personally motivated aggression against the low-born, supposedly vulgar Jew Heine had no grounding in fact: O, dieser Streit wird endgen nimmermehr, Stets wird die Wahrheit hadern mit dem Schönen, Stets wird geschieden sein der Menschheit Heer In zwei Partein: Barbaren und Hellenen.592

Heine’s prologue to Bimini, another Matratzengruft poem, is a pervasive undermining of Positive Romantic prophecies of unity and millennium ante portas. Novalis’s blue flower of Romanticism, a symbol of man’s yearning for and expectation of Paradise Regained, serves as starting point for a mordant satire on belief in miracles, medievalism, primitivism, progress, etc. The time when one could believe in a religion with such visions as Eden, the Paradise or Millennium of the Jews and Christians, or Bimini, the Happy Island of the American Indians, are long past. Wunderglaube! Blaue Blume, Die verschollen jetzt, wie prachtvoll Blühte sie im Menschenherzen Zu der Zeit, von der wir singen!593

Expeditions to exotic countries such as India yielded new diseases as well as new riches, and are, moreover, identified with colonialism and exploitation. As in Byron’s Don Juan, every step forward involves a step backward, so that there can be neither a past nor future paradise. It was in search of Bimini that Ponce de Lejn, a Spanish conquistador, discovered and occupied Florida for the Spanish crown. There is no Bimini, as there is no historical synthesis and no metaphysical Heaven, except in the dreams of fools. Consequently, there is no Platonic or Keatsian jakoj!cah_a, because the “book of beauty” is radically different from the “book of truth” – Heine’s Weltriss, as also manifested in his pre592 Heine, Nachgelesene Gedichte 1845–1856, III. Abteilung: Lamentationen, 33, lines 137–140, in: Sämtliche Schriften, VI. I. 349. 593 Heine, Bimini, Prolog, lines 1–4, ed. cit. VI. I. 243.

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Arnoldian distinction of Hellenism from Hebraism. Neither are poets prophets of Paradise, instead being merely wishful, fantastic dreamers when they build ships of verses to take their readers to any given imagined paradise, such as Bimini. And, also as in Byron’s Don Juan, this ship has no helm but fancy, meaning no reason for poetological control: Phantasie sitzt an dem Steuer, Gute Laune bläht die Segel, Schiffsjung ist der Witz, der flinke. Ob Verstand an Bord? Ich weiß nicht! Meine Rahen sind Metaphern, Die Hyperbel ist mein Mastbaum, Schwarz-rot-gold ist meine Flagge, Fabelfarben der Romantik – Trikolore Barbarossas, Wie ich weiland sie gesehen Im Kyffhäuser und zu Frankfurt In dem Dome von Sankt Paul.594

Nor could Heine help dreaming any more than Byron could, again and again, in spite of his professed Romantic Disillusionism, much in the same way that Positive Romantic verse could not help doubting. In Atta Troll (MS 1841), his farewell poem to the na"ve expectations and obtrusive moralizing of Positive Romanticism that he wrote in his Parisian exile so late in his life, Heine admitted that the old dreams of Adelbert von Chamisso, Clemens Brentano, and Friedrich de la Motte Fouqu8 still rang through his modern, sceptical lines: Ja, mein Freund, es sind die Klänge Aus der längst verschollnen Traumzeit; Nur daß oft moderne Triller Gaukeln durch den alten Grundton.595

Heine’s scepticism included Karl Marx and Ferdinand Freiligrath, who maintained their Positive Romantic expectation of a secularized, terrestrial Paradise Regained, now derided as na"ve, primitivist “Gleichheitsschwindel”:596 “Strenge Gleichheit! Jeder Esel Sei befugt zum höchsten Staatsamt […]”.597 In fact, the revolutionary German flag of 1848 reanimated the heraldic colours of the Stauffer Emperors of Germany, following the typically nineteenth-century cult of 594 595 596 597

Ibid. lines 165–176, ed. cit. VI. I. 248. Heine, Atta Troll, caput 27, stanza 9, ed. cit. IV. 570. Ibid. caput 5, stanza 24, ed. cit. IV. 509. Ibid. caput 6, stanza 12, ed. cit. IV. 511.

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the idealized Middle Ages. It expressed yearning for political liberty, a past (and hopefully future) paradise constructed against present Prussian repression, and Heine foresaw its failure both for Germany and France. 1848 was also the year of his final confinement to his pain-ridden sick-bed or Matratzengruft in Paris – like an unrequited Lazarus and unliberated Prometheus – a personal experience of the failure of paradisiacal dreams which he projected onto the failure of dreams in politics. French dreams ended with Napoleon III’s accession to the French throne in 1851, German dreams with Frederick William IV’s reticence and William I’s accession to the Prussian throne in 1861. Just a few years following the German Nationalversammlung (or Parliament) had assembled in Frankfurt’s St Paul’s Church in 1848, the old order was once again restored. Heine died in his Matratzengruft in 1856, a year before the publication of Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal (1857) and seven years before the publication of Baudelaire’s Le peintre de la vie moderne (1863). The idea of the illusion of Paradise succeeded by the disillusionment of Paradise Lost is a leitmotif throughout Baudelaire’s poetry and prose. Debased by a self-degrading Creator, as in Gnosticism, fallen man lives in a disintegrative split between spirituality and animality. His unconquerable longing for original unity and “l’id8al” is forever frustrated; “8l8vation” is forever followed by “chute”, producing an increased sense of “spleen”, taedium vitae or world-weariness.598 The anamnetic quest for the ideal is open-ended, always doomed to fail and fall back, and the Promethean or Byronic speakers and heroes are those who celebrate Satan and Satanism out of the awareness that the Creator’s injustice has excluded them from unity, and expelled them from Paradise forever. Romantic Disillusionism placed emphasis on classical form and scansion as the only means of domesticating existential chaos and aestheticizing existential ugliness. This has been identified as one of the characteristics of the Modern.599 Fanz Grillparzer, for instance, attacked popular Platonic Romanticism for its neglect of formal mastery, finding that it sought to listen to the inborn rhythms of natural men, savages and children (in the sense of Shelley’s Defence of Poetry), rather than following the firmly established classical forms and scansions learned in school. In Grillparzer’s sceptical view, the prevalent Platonic-Romantic penchant for mysticism, “jenem Ahnen, Sehnen und übersinnlichen Schauen”, replaces classical mastery, debilitates classical artistry, and has no foundation in nature. “Die Formlosigkeit, welche ein Hauptingrediens der sogenannten Romantik ist, war von jeher ein Zeichen eines schwachen kränkelnden Geistes, der sich selbst und seinen Stoff zu beherrschen nicht ver-

598 See the first of the six sections of Les fleurs du mal, Spleen et id8al, ed. cit. 7–77. 599 See Hugo Friedrich, Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik, Hamburg 1956, 25–43.

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mag”.600 Grillparzer’s debt to Weimar Classicism is merely formal without its accompanying socio-political conservatism, and that form is occasionally broken to give glimpses of nature’s disharmony and chaos – a fact repressed by those who raised Grillparzer to the pedestal of being Austria’s national poet. Metaphysics is mere speculation, wishful thinking, whereas a sane person must be content with the nature that can be grasped with the senses and given a soothing form by art: Aber die Form ist göttlich. Sie schließt ab wie die Natur, wie die Wirklichkeit. Über das wahrhaft Vorhandene geht kein Gesund-Organisierter hinaus. Durch die Form beruhigt die Kunst und ist allem Wissen überlegen.601

The open admission of classical form-giving, as outlined above, came to replace the lost Positive Romantic belief in (or pretence of) inspiration, as we understand it from the self-fashioning of the male Positive Romantic poets, William Wordsworth, Coleridge, Percy Shelley, and Keats. In the wake of Byron, Poe deconstructed all poses of the inspired prophet-poet by making the poet’s artisanship, or his rationally calculated procedure in the making of a work of art, explicit.602 The convalescent narrator of Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), who believes in seeing the world afresh with the eyes of a Romantic child, soon realizes his failure as his experience of disease and pain means he can no longer be a child to view creation in its Wordsworthian glory. Baudelaire’s aesthetics of the shock in his De l’essence du rire (1855, 1857), St8phane Mallarm8’s aesthetics of laborious and impersonal devotion to art in Divagations (1897), and Paul Val8ry’s aesthetics of the waking convalescent in ‘La jeune Parque’ (1917) and other poems can be cited as attempts at reanimating the time-honoured myth of inspiration in a godless modern world. What remains is the adult craftsmanship of Horace and Neoclassicism. Baudelaire openly mocked poses of inspiration and Positive Romantic beliefs in the natural poetical qualification of youth, adopting Byron’s and Poe’s assumption of biologically effected creative phases and recommending hard work – a view of the artist later subscribed to by Mallarm8: L’inspiration est d8cid8ment la sœur du travail journalier. […] L’inspiration ob8it, comme la faim, comme la digestion, comme le sommeil.603 600 Grillparzer, Über den Gebrauch des Ausdrucks Romantisch in der neueren Kunstkritik, 1819, in: Aufsätze über Literatur, Musik und Theater, ed. August Sauer et al., Vienna 1925, 30. Here, “Romantic” and “Romanticism” resume their old dysphemistic Neoclassical meaning of artistic impotence. 601 Grillparzer, Studien zur Literatur, 1836, in: Werke, ed. cit. II. 279. 602 Poe, The Philosophy of Composition, Philadelphia 1846, and review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, Philadelphia 1842. Both essays published in Graham’s Magazine. 603 Baudelaire, Conseils aux jeunes litt8rateurs, Du travail et de l’inspiration, 1846, in: Œuvres complHtes, ed. cit. 482. See also Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, IV. 436–437 and 630–631; and, for Mallarm8, IV. 452–453 and 639.

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In Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal (1857), the Parnassian regularity of the traditional stanzas contrasts with the new, shocking content as the ideal contrasts with the real, though also broken by occasional pararhymes foreboding disharmony and evil. Beauty had become restricted to a pure form, covering up ugliness and the chaos within rather than pointing to a paradise without and beyond. The poet, like the dandy, makes disjunct nature bearable by a strict imposition of form. Baudelaire’s blasphemous collection contains a poem that deconstructs Positive Romantic prophecies of Paradise in much the same way as Byron and Heine, “Un Voyage / CythHre”. The speaker’s school-taught vision of Cythera, holy island of Venus among the sunlit Greek isles, had been idealized to such a degree that his soul hovered, like a bird, in the rigging of the ship on which he then actually visited that paradise of his dreams. On his approach, the sublime vision of a terrestrial paradise was transformed into a shocking awareness of the terrestrial reality : “Quelle est cette %le triste et noire?”604 Conflicting voices of various speakers – anticipating the chaos of voices in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) – announce a sterile desert beyond all hope of regeneration. The voices try to recapture, or remain faithful to, the “id8al”: but, in fact, only increase the “spleen” caused by disillusionment. In that wasteland of broken shells and shrieking seagulls, later to become Swinburne’s forsaken garden, there were neither cooing doves nor shady groves surrounding a holy temple with a young, devout priestess, her white robe floating on soft breezes. Instead, the speaker glimpses a hanged criminal whose rotting corpse is mangled by beasts and birds with bloody muzzles and beaks as they greedily devour the carcass. A carcass is just that, “une charogne”, and in no way a symbol of resurrection.605 Not only that, but the criminal has been denied a Christian grave, a further fact forbidding thoughts of resurrection. The animals torture the criminal like hangmen, so that the Christian distinction of human from non-human beings is doubted. The criminal’s silent suffering also recalls Byron’s and Heine’s Prometheanism. Doomed by a sadistic Creator to become a criminal and suffer for crimes that were not his own, the hanged man typifies the condition of all humanity, at once inconsistently revolting and ridiculous. The poem recalls FranÅois Villon’s famous “Ballade des pendus” (1461–1462), but radicalizes its biblical prayer for forgiveness by omitting the doctrine of the Sermon on the Mount. The Lord’s Prayer is replaced with a Promethean prayer to the Evil Creator that the disillusioned Romantic speaker may no longer vomit at His bleeding creation which desperately and absurdly dreams of a non-existent Paradise: 604 Baudelaire, Les fleurs du mal, Un Voyage / CythHre, line 5, 111. It has been suggested that Victor Hugo’s poem C8rigo, in Les Contemplations (1856), was a Positive Romantic reply to the previously published version of Baudelaire’s poem. Cerigo was the Latin name of Cythera. 605 Cf. ibid., Une charogne, 29–31.

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Dans ton %le, i V8nus! je n’ai trouv8 debout Qu’un gibet symbolique oF pendait mon image.… – Ah! Seigneur! donnez-moi la force et le courage De contempler mon cœur et mon corps sans d8go0t!606

Baudelaire’s self-fashioning as poHte maudit and grand abandonn8, epitomizing man’s Geworfenheit, became the hallmark of the whole movement, from Byron to Ernest Dowson and Lionel Johnson. In the memorable words of James Thomson, man is “Shut out alike from Heaven and Earth and Hell”.607 Baudelaire’s professed jealousy of the lot of the basest animals, who spend their lifetimes without suffering from the consciousness of life’s futility,608 is one of numerous expressions of that stance. However, to equate that pose with sentimental imposture or mere masquerade, as many critics of Byron and Baudelaire have done, is to be blind to the true suffering of generations of poets after the repeated failure of highly strung Romantic expectations. In his obituary on Byron, the old Goethe, who had fought for sexual liberation all his life, sensed the poet’s cor laceratum and followed “einem so seltenen Leben und Dichten in aller seiner Excentrizität”,609 was generous enough to distinguish between the tragedy of an author, who had to fight his way through mud and disorientation, and the literary work which he truly admired without being able to share its world view.

606 Ibid., Un Voyage / CythHre, lines 56–60 (final stanza), ed. cit. 113. Note the biblical diction. The Lord’s Prayer repeats the doctrine of the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 7, 1–2: “Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged; and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.” 607 Thomson B.V., The City of Dreadful Night, VI. 56, I. 139. 608 Baudelaire, Les fleurs du mal, De Profundis Clamavi, line 13, 31. The poem may be read as a parody on Psalm 130. 609 Goethe, Zum Andenken Byrons, 1826, in: Sämtliche Werke, ed. cit. XXII. 730. For Goethe’s keen interest in homoeroticism, as the self-fashioned Simon Bolivar of sexual liberation, see W. Daniel Wilson, Goethe: Männer, Knaben: Ansichen zur “Homosexualität”, Berlin 2012, passim.

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Awidespread feeling existed that active heroes, who could decide their own fates, were a thing of the past, or at least of mythology. The autonomy of the self was no longer taken for granted any more than the homogeneity of the self. In the wake of Enlightenment scepticism such as the Baron d’Holbach’s, Romantic Platonism and Romantic Disillusionism shared the concept of man as heteronomous, subject to necessity, not acting – as in Enlightenment optimism and Neoclassical poetology – but rather being acted upon. P.B. Shelley’s Platonism, as most clearly expressed in his “Defense of Poetry” (MS 1821), saw man – and the poet in particular – as an Aeolian harp moved by the World Soul, as the organ or prophet of a voice from the world of ideas, or as a mirror of the future. His long endnote on a line from Queen Mab (1813), “Necessity! thou mother of the world!” (VI. 198), is too well known to require further comment, as is Hegel’s doctrine of the ruse of reason in history, “die List der Vernunft in der Geschichte”, teaching that men of action merely believe that they are acting, while the Absolute (the necessity of dialectics in history located in the world of ideas) is directing them. To Hegel, the activist Napoleon was nothing but the World Soul on horseback. Byron’s anti-Platonic Disillusionism also conceived man as driven by impulses not subject to his or her will through non-metaphysical, mostly destructive impulses such as passions and the uncontrollable powers of the unconscious, or by the constitution of the individual brain. In connection with strong suspicions of his own possibly inherited madness, Byron was fascinated by the new science of phrenology as founded by Franz Joseph Gall and his disciple Johannes Spurzheim in Germany, and he was one of the first patients to have his skull examined when Spurzheim came to London in 1814. The anti-Romantic Victorians reached back to Enlightenment concepts of human autonomy. As was his usual way, and in line with Victorian mainstream thought, Tennyson opposed both Romantic Platonism and Romantic Disillusionism when he made Pallas Athene admonish the despairing Oenone with the Socratic-Platonic philosophy of the Classical Tradition including Christianity :

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‘Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control, These three alone lead life to sovereign power.’610

Standing in the line of Byronic Romantic Disillusionism, Grillparzer’s dramas are about man’s self-deception concerning his autonomy of action, in opposition to optimistic Enlightenment philosophy and Weimar Classicism. The Will wills because it must (“Unser Wille will oft, weil er muss”),611 is a key insight in Grillparzer’s tragedy Die Jüdin von Toledo (MS ca 1855, posth. 1872), echoing the philosophy and intentionally ambiguous terminology of Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1819–1844), playing with the meaning of the individual weak will vainly trying to control the irrational impulses, and the general metaphysical Will to live. The matter engaged Grillparzer throughout his whole career as a dramatist, from his very beginnings in 1816 to his death in 1872, when the play was finally performed on stage. Man tends to be blind to the fact that his allegedly autonomous will is not his own, but is rather the irresistible and irrational impulses of his species. Rahel, the titular heroine, and Alfonso, the Spanish king, will love each other despite the king’s married state, the heroine’s discriminated religion, and the court’s raison d’ 8tat. It is what Schopenhauer calls the whining of the species through the individual, who is a mere gluttonous slave of sex in youth (Rahel and Alfonso) and of gold in old age (Isak). In accordance with this sceptical Schopenhauerian anthropology, the king’s conviction that his will and orders can solve the problem and prevent the political murder of his beloved Rahel proves erroneous. Neither are the will and orders of the Spanish queen nobles, forcing them to have Rahel murdered, any more autonomous. Consequently, there can be no personal, human guilt and no penal justice. The play’s Schopenhauerian philosophy, condensed in the words of Rahel’s sister Esther, is underscored against the background of the play’s classical Weimarian form: All was geschieht ist Recht. Wer sich beklagt, Verklagt sich selbst und seine eigne Torheit.612

The narrator of Poe’s Gothic tale “Ligeia” (1838) is proved incorrect in his assumption that man can only die when he gives up his will to live. Ligeia, the narrator’s beloved first wife, dies in spite of her tremendous fight for life; and the narrator’s will to overcome his mourning in a second marriage also fails as his second wife, Rowena, dies and his feverish fancy sees her resurrection as Ligeia. This is merely the vision of an opium dream, considering that Rowena stands for 610 Tennyson, Oenone, 1832, 1842, 142–143, in: Poems, ed. Christopher Ricks, Longmans Annotated English Poets, 2nd edn. London 1987, I. 428. 611 Grillparzer, Die Jüdin von Toledo, 1872, in: Werke, act II, ed. cit. I. 824. 612 Ibid. act V, ed. cit. I. 866.

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reality and materiality, Ligeia for art and spirituality. There are strong indications that Ligeia is, from the start, a Byronic Egeria, a creature of the mind. Otherwise expressed, the narrator’s own will to first create, then recreate Ligeia produces a short-lived work of the imagination, no Keatsian thing of beauty that is a joy forever. Ligeia’s apocalyptic death song, “The Conqueror Worm”, suggests the disillusioned truth in a vision of the great theatre of life, where men are mere marionettes played by invisible puppeteers in a tragedy of fate as they move around in absurd circles: Mere puppets they, who come and go At bidding of vast formless things That shift the scenery to and fro, Flapping from out their Condor wings, Invisible Wo!613

Nelly Dean, the Christian narrator of Emily Bront[’s Wuthering Heights (1847), makes a fool of herself when she tells Lockwood how insistently and vainly she had tried to teach the Byronic hero Heathcliff the Bible, just as Joseph, the old, stupid servant, had vainly tried to whip the Bible into him. They do not understand that there exist passions beyond man’s rational or pious control; elementary, fatal storms that sweep over human lives, destroying everything in their way until they are spent, as in the unrepentant Heathcliff ’s decline and death. Symbolic of that neopagan world view, the heath creeps back over Heathcliff ’s, Catherine’s, and Edgar’s graves at the margin of the churchyard. In D.G. Rossetti’s scandalous sonnet “Nuptial Sleep” (1870), on which Buchanan cracked down in his review of Rossetti’s verse mentioned above as belonging to “The Fleshly School of Poetry” (1871), the unashamed speaker describes the orgasm of the pair in terms of an elementary storm with torrents of rain, hopelessly beyond the control of men, raging, flagging, and finally becoming spent. The irresistibility of !m\cjg, or fatum, characterized Gothic fiction in particular from its inception with Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1765) and The Mysterious Mother (1768). The “monstrous guilt” mentioned by Edmund, the son and unknowing lover of the incestuous Countess of Narbonne, is not a personal guilt presupposing freedom of will, but the result of the irresistible impulses overpowering all the horrid tragedy’s characters.614 The titular heroine’s acceptance of suffering follows the Stoicism of the Classical Tradition rather than Christian constancy and patience. And Walpole’s numerous references to classical Greek incest tragedy, Oedipus Tyrannus by Sophocles and Hippolytus by Euripides, underline his Gothic play’s neopagan fatalism just as 613 Poe, Tales of Mystery and Imagination, Ligeia, 1838, in: Collected Works, II. 318. 614 Walpole, The Mysterious Mother, 1768, V/1, 417, in: Five Romantic Plays, 1768–1821, ed. Paul Baines – Edward Burns, Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford and New York 2000, 62.

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much as they mockingly excuse his offence against the Neoclassical rule of decorum among others satirized in his Postscript. When Walpole’s followers Lord Byron, John Polidori, and Mary Shelley held their Gothic fiction competition at the Villa Diodati in June 1816, fate was seen as playing a major role under Switzerland’s overpowering mountains and Alpine thunderstorms, read as being symbolic. It dominates the lives of all these novels’ heroes and heroines. Polidori’s Ernestus Berchtold (1819) makes the irresistible power of towering mountains a central symbol of his Gothic novel, with his titular hero being doomed by fate from birth and early education in the shadows of the Swiss Alps. Under the impression of her father William Godwin’s necessitarianism and the “guiltless guilt” of the Byronic heroes, Mary Shelley’s tragic heroes and heroines are also determined by a fate which their will is powerless to resist. In her Matilda (MS 1819), the titular heroine and her father are both guiltless in a sense of personal responsibility : their incestuous thoughts are conditioned both by their false education (implicitly criticized by Mary Shelley) and by adverse circumstances. Undeserved and unexpected death strikes the young, beautiful wives of her father and her friend and expels them from their imagined paradises without hope of Paradise Regained. The novella’s numerous references to Greek tragedy emphasize the dominating role of fate. Matilda’s retrospective, deathbed narration reveals her as a victim of things as they are rather than being an active sinner. Her self-reproaches, like her father’s, do not strike us as confessions of crimes for which a terrestrial or divine judge might hold her to acoount. Descended from the Byronic heroes, Musset’s Rolla differs from Hercules, who, at the crossroads, could make his free choice between virtue and vice, and win. However, the march of time has so eroded the choice and sullied the beauty of the right path that a clear decision can no longer be made.615 Rolla is just such a mixture of virtue and vice, innocence and guilt, nobility and meanness, so disorientated by a loss of firm guidelines as to make him a weak, childish character lacking autonomy and able only to let himself drift. In this respect, his fate is that of the Byronic heroes: Ce n’8tait pas Rolla qui gouvernait sa vie, C’8taient ses passions […]616

The increase of reason and knowledge has engendered cultural progress, and liberty of thought and speech, but man is still an animal simply following his amorous or sanguinary instincts. The gradual discovery of the ever-present, ever-active unconscious as the seat of the chaotic id, with its instinctual drives, in 615 Musset, Rolla, 1833, 2. 32–39, in: Po8sies complHtes, 276. 616 Ibid. 2. 9–10, ed. cit. 275.

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the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, we have seen, undermined the Enlightenment concept of the autonomous self with its governing reason. Moreover, the tenuous boundary that, according to Christianity’s anthropocentric doctrine, separated beasts and plants from man – the alleged crown of creation – was removed, though in a negative sense and radically different from the evolutionary and universal-love theories of Erasmus Darwin, P.B. Shelley and Positive Romanticism: On ne mutile plus la pens8e et la scHne, On a mis au plein vent l’intelligence humaine; Mais le peuple voudra des combats de taureau.617

The march of time had also depopulated the heavens; the parents of modern man are dead. But the liberty thus gained is not that allowing an adult to make any free choice, but that of a childish libertine wasting his money and drifting into the bed of a child prostitute. The prophetic children of Platonic Romanticism have been replaced by the immature and helpless children of Romantic Disillusionism. The young lovers are both innocent and corrupt in their vain and fatal affairs, mere modern victims of fate. In the sceptical anthropology of Romantic Disillusionism, man’s split nature would not allow the contrary forces of his mind – impulse and restriction, passions and reason – to cooperate, neither in his search for truth nor in the conduct of his life. On the brink of a precipice, man’s paradoxical impulse for self-destruction could eclipse all rational insight into the certainty of a horrible death, prompting an irresistible urge to fling himself into the abyss. Under stress and in extreme situations, especially in love and war, the death force would prevail over the helm of reason, unless the other natural instinct, the life force, prevailed. This is typical of the heroes and heroines of the Gothic novel, the Gothic tale, and the Gothic drama, and especially of the School of Horror – early manifestations of Romantic Disillusionism. An old study of the Gothic horror genre has excellently described this diabolical whirlwind of irresistible passions: The villain’s sardonic smile is replaced by wild outbursts of diabolical laughter, his scowls grow darker and darker, and his designs become more bloody and more dangerous, his victims no more sigh plaintively, but give utterance to piercing shrieks and despairing yells; tearful Amandas are unceremoniously thrust into the background by vindictive Matildas, whose passions rage in all their primitive savagery ; the fearful ghost ‘fresh courage takes,’ and stands forth audaciously in the light of day ; the very devil stalks shamelessly abroad in manifold disguises. We are caught up from first to last in the very tempest, torrent, and whirlwind of passion.618 617 Ibid. 4. 129–131, ed. cit. 287. 618 Edith Birkhead, The Tale of Terror: A Study of the Gothic Romance, London 1921, New York 1963, 157.

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All the characters of Walpole’s Gothic tragedy The Mysterious Mother (1768), male or female, young or old, Catholic or Protestant, are irresistibly driven by their sexual impulses, with the exception of the two criminal monks Martin and Benedict, who replace their lust with greed for riches and power. Even Peter, the old and honest porter of the castle, still has vitality enough to feel the overpowering sexual drive so that he excuses the Duchess of Narbonne’s failure in her attempts to live an ascetic life. Ambrosio, the titular villain of Matthew Gregory Lewis’s Gothic novel The Monk (1796), is helpless when seduced by the beauty of the infernal Rosario-Matilda, even in the surroundings of his pious convent. And Miss Aubrey, the melancholy sister of the rich and virtuous, yet easily gullible, young Aubrey in John Polidori’s Gothic tale “The Vampyre” (1819), is equally helpless when seduced by the charm of the infernal Lord Ruthven, alias the Earl of Marsden. Nor can Aubrey’s good nature, brotherly love, youth, and health enable him to save Miss Aubrey : horror drives him to the brink of madness, he is confined, and his rage over his nightmarish helplessness causes an apoplexy from which he dies. Virtue, piety, and health each have a dark underside that constantly thwarts man’s capacity for rational action and control. Exposure to chance and character, helplessness, and aimlessness of purpose are typical of the Romantic tragic hero and heroine with their split natures, including the Byronic hero. In their world of lost certainties, they have no plan on which to act. Whereas Shakespeare’s Richard III and Lady Macbeth have a clear line of action, they drift in blind activism. A splendid example is Norma, the titular heroine of Vincenzo Bellini’s opera of 1831. Priestess and mother, Gallic nationalist in love with the commander of the occupying Roman army, torn between love and hatred to the brink of murdering her beloved children entrusted to the care of her rival Adalgisa, she first calls for peace and then to war as she first decides to take her revenge on her faithless Roman lover Pollione by sacrificing him to her gods and then sacrifices herself by confessing her treason. Bellini’s music serves to underscore the fact that all her contradictory actions happen on the spur of the moment. In his Gothic tragedy Bertram (1816), published in the year when Byron wrote Manfred and revised with his help, Charles Robert Maturin created a dark titular hero akin to the Byronic hero; a murderer who cannot help but commit his crimes from motives of love (Imogine) and hatred (Aldobrand), and whom the pious prior can no more convert to virtue and repentance than the pious abbot can make Manfred pray. Neither Bertram nor Imogine have a clear, sustained plan of action. It is on the spur of the moment that Bertram changes his plan of revenge, in his seduction of Imogine to adultery, for a new one of murdering her husband Aldobrand, while Imogene, torn between helpless love and marital faith, watches the murder in simultaneous repentance and then kills her beloved children. Her contraries end in scenes of madness that her split nature has predetermined. She is neither the

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traditional Mary-type nor the traditional Eve-type of woman but stands in between, much as Rahel, Grillparzer’s Jewess of Toledo, wavers between femme fatale, femme fragile, and femme forte; between naivet8 and slyness. Both Maturin’s titular villain and his pious prior partake of the antithetically mixed nature of man – the dark villain can be noble and the noble prior can erupt into murderous hatred – contraries that do not allow man to act reasonably. Following the model of Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1765), these contraries are symbolized by the proximity of a dark castle to a pious monastery inhabited by monks, a scene simultaneously serious and comical. In the play’s original version, sent to Walter Scott in a manuscript preserved in Abbotsford, this effect was increased by the presence of the turret of an infernal Dark Knight. And the play’s giddily rapid change of scenes that Drury Lane had to fill with entre-acte performances must have added to the sense of fragmentation. Similarly, the heroes and heroines of Joanna Baillie’s Plays on the Passions helplessly slide into a pre-Poesque monomania, dominated by indomitable and irreconcilable passions such as love and hatred, virtue and vice, humility and ambition, and courage and fear. They can neither help themselves nor can their nearest relations and closest friends save them from irrational self-destruction. The attempts by the noble Jane de Monfort, the sociable Count Freberg, and the faithful servant Manuel to pull De Monfort away from his hatred of Rezenveld are equally doomed to failure in Baillie’s most famous Gothic drama. Neither their rational arguments nor their appeals to the feeling heart can prevent the noble De Monfort from becoming a murderer. Here, man was no longer the Aristotelian social animal of Enlightenment optimism, but stood in ontological, individualistic isolation.619 Byron, who admired De Monfort (1798) and tried to have it restaged in the Drury Lane Theatre in 1815, was the link between Baillie and Poe. Poe’s characters, on the brink of death, are the victims of either the primitive, elementary life force or the equally primitive, elementary death force. We have already seen this in the weakness of Grillparzer’s dramatic protagonists, lovers and warriors, designed against the Platonist theories of August Wilhelm Schlegel, and Grillparzer’s satirical exposition of Heinrich and Matthäus von Collin’s idealized heroes: Deine Personen seien Ideale! […] Dein Held sei stark und fest, wie ein Felsstück! Keine menschliche Regung, kein Aufwallen natürlicher Empfindungen schwäche sein kraftschäumendes Tun […]620

Kleist’s Graf Wetter vom Strahl and Käthchen von Heilbronn, who fall in love with each other against all social conventions, are merely playthings of fate. As 619 Isobel Armstrong, Byron and Satanic Drama, 17. 620 Grillparzer, Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum, 1809, in: Werke, ed. cit. II. 226–227.

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the count’s name indicates, he has mesmeric power, but his encounter with and power over Käthchen are accidental, not willed, whatever superstitious accusations of devilry Käthchen’s father might advance against him. Käthchen, a commoner promised by her father to another commoner, follows Graf Wetter as if in a trance; against his and her own will. The somnambulism scene under the juniper bush, where the count questions the simple girl while she lies in a waking trance, reveals an irresistible love. But, and typical of Romantic Disillusionism, interpretations of dreams and visions can go wrong, as in the case of the count’s misinterpretation of his earlier vision that had almost driven him into the fangs of the femme fatale Kunigunde instead of the loving arms of Käthchen. Thrown back on his sensibility in default of rational cognition, man must discover that his sensibility and imagination are just as deceptive as his reason. Kleist’s earliest play, Die Familie Schroffenstein (1803), was a Romantic Disillusionist version of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, showing the misguiding, and ultimately destructive, potential of human instincts. And in Kleist’s last play, Prinz Friedrich von Homburg (1811), the protagonist (a young Prussian officer, like Kleist himself) has a fatal dream of glory, ending in an execution scene where the Prince’s vivid imagination sees a beautiful, immortal world beyond, only to awaken to the reality of the Prussian ancien r8gime, with its constraints and bloodshed, when the bandage is taken off his eyes. The dream, which according to nascent Romantic psychoanalysis expresses man’s secret desires and yearnings to overcome restrictions and to escape into a better world, ends in a nightmare. The Positive Romantic belief in the saving power of the imagination is called in doubt, as well as the existence of a saving life and world after death. Nietzsche remarked that Kleist and Byron (as well as Leopardi, Musset, Poe, and Nikolay Gogol) shared a noble rebellion against bourgeois norms, although he resented their decadent egotism and lamenting of man’s vulnerability, which would not allow them the status of supermen.621 The Byronic hero is vulnerable because he disdains to join and hide himself in the crowd of hypocritical philistines. Solitary in his aloofness from the decent bourgeois Spießbürger, disdaining their drabness of life and mendacious morality, he is like a noble wild horse that leaves the protecting caravan in the desert of life. Early death is the result – the price paid for an excited life – and the earth will swallow him with the same total indifference as it will later the decent members of the caravan: Et le p.le d8sert roule sur son enfant Les flots silencieux de son linceul mouvant.622

621 Gerhart Hoffmeister, Byron und der europäische Byronismus, 148. See also the comparison of Kleist and Byron in Roger Ayrault, Heinrich von Kleist, Paris 1966, passim. 622 Musset, Rolla, 1833, 2. 90–91, in: Po8sies complHtes, 277.

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In the masquerade of life, the lonely Byronic hero prefers to go naked, exhibiting frail humanity as it is – an indiscriminate mix of vice and virtue exposed to every blow of fate.623 His daring scorn of the cowardly bourgeois and philistine with his search for and illusion of safety was an outstanding mark of Romantic Disillusionism. Broken, weak, antithetically mixed man is never really fortified against fate in whatever form it seeks to destroy him. “Could you not drink her haze like wine?”, the knowledgeable speaker addresses the reader of D.G. Rossetti’s poem “The Card Dealer” (MS 1848), envisaging a female personification of an unvanquishable fatum, composed of fortune teller, seductress, cheat, and femme fatale. Rossetti himself painted her as one his typical femmes fatales – beautiful, mysterious, unfathomable, seductive but cold. Golden-haired, irresistible, and intoxicating, she promises riches in a vainly dreamed terrestrial paradise that turns out to be “a land without any order”, “A land of darkness […] And of the shadow of death”.624 Unlike Fortuna in Boethius’s De consolation philosophiae (524), who honestly challenges man to gamble with her, Rossetti’s card dealer is a hustler, giving man no chance to win. The speaker’s insight into fate’s foul play does not help him any more than his readers, who must all follow the false promise of gold and life to be precipitated into dust and death – death being the end of all, and the poem’s last word: Whom plays she with? With thee, who lov’st Those gems upon her hand; With me, who search her secret brows; With all men, bless’d or bann’d. We play together, she and we, Within a vain strange land.625

The game of cards was an old metaphor for the view of life as a broken chain of simple contingencies. Kleist, in whose work chance and coincidence (in the literal sense of falling) was central to action, used it in his letters and supplemented it with the image of an arch or dome, which does not stand up due to an ordered plan of action from each individual stone, but merely because it is the nature of all stones that they gravitate.626 Man raises his self-esteem by falsely imagining that he is acting instead of being acted upon by nature and circumstance. Kleist’s proud Norman leader Robert Guiskard must admit that mere chance raised him to power : 623 624 625 626

Ibid. 2. 62–63, ed. cit. 277. D.G. Rossetti, The Card Dealer, lines 25–30, in: Collected Poetry and Prose, 49. Ibid. lines 25–30. Kleist, Letter to Ulrike Kleist, 5 February 1801, and Letter to Wilhelmine von Zenge, 16 November 1800, in: Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, IV. 200 and 159.

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Des Herrschers Sohn, durch Gottes Gunst, bin ich, Ein Prinz, der von dem Zufall groß gezogen.627

In “Die Verlobung in St. Domingo” (1810), it is by mere chance that Toni sees a rope to bind her beloved Gustav in an ingenious plan to save his life, “der Himmel weiß durch welchen Zufall” – a tragic decision that leads to his and her own destruction, narrated ironically so as to doubt Divine Providence.628 As in “Das Erdbeben in Chili” (1808), where mere chance makes the desperate Jeronimo see a rope with which to hang himself and then prevents him from accomplishing his plan, man is entangled, or “verstrickt”, in an adverse fate, tied down with ropes like Gustav in Toni’s miscarried plan to save his life. It is only in fairy tales that we can ourselves accomplish our wishes, and that a low-born tailor can become an emperor by virtue of his rational planning, maintaining his throne and his marital happiness. This doctrine of Negative Romanticism becomes clear when we compare Tieck’s ironic fairy tale Leben des berühmten Kaisers Abraham Tonelli (1798) with Grillparzer’s realistic tragedy König Ottokars Glück und Ende (1825). In the fairy tale, the Gulliverian protagonist and first-person narrator, with his command of magic, can write his “wahrhafte Geschichte, um der Welt zu zeigen, dass man am Ende durchsetzt, was man sich ernsthaft vorgesetzt hat”, and concludes: “Die idealischen Träume meiner Kinderjahre sind an mir in Erfüllung gegangen: das erleben nur wenige Menschen”.629 In the tragedy, by contrast, the Napoleon-like protagonist experiences the failure of all his false promises, dreams, careful plans, and ideals. We are reminded of Hoffmann’s sombre novella “Das Majorat” (1817), where all the pre-revolutionary care and planning of old Roderich to maintain the ancienr8gime order, with its law of primogeniture succession, proves disastrous and abortive: Armer alter, kurzsichtiger Roderich! welche böse Macht beschworst du herauf, die den Stamm, den du mit fester Wurzel für die Ewigkeit zu pflanzen gedachtest, im ersten Aufkeimen zum Tode vergiftete.630

As outlined above, the favourite contemporary example of an outstanding intellectual wheeled and whirled to his death by ruinous fate’s false promises of a lasting empire was Napoleon Bonaparte, with whom Byron felt kinship. Byron’s initials NB (Noel Byron) were consciously modelled upon Napoleon’s.631 Byron’s fine “Ode to Napoleon”, written in London shortly after hearing news of Na627 628 629 630 631

Kleist, Robert Guiskard, Phöbus-Fragment, scene VI, ed. cit. I. 246. Kleist, Die Verlobung in St. Domingo, 1810, ed. cit. III. 154. Tieck, Abraham Tonelli, in: Werke, II. 173. Hoffmann, Nachtstücke, Das Majorat, 1816–1817, in: Sämtliche poetischen Werke, I. 830. Joanne Wilkes, Byron and Madame de Sta[l: Born for Opposition, Aldershot 1999, 20.

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poleon’s abdication (6 April 1814), celebrated the Emperor’s downfall as a lesson to future conquerors: Nor till thy fall could mortals guess Ambition’s less than littleness. Thanks for that lesson – It will teach To after-warriors more Than high philosophy can preach, And vainly preached before.632

Byron’s reference to the death of the overambitious Greek athlete Milo, later taken up in Emily Bront[’s Wuthering Heights (1847), underscores the warning, which had had little effect throughout history. The fates of overreaching conquerors before Napoleon, too, had “vainly preached” moderation and selfcontrol. In her unfinished closet drama Hildegund (MS ca 1803), Karoline von Günderrode dramatized the fate of Attila, who invaded the Germanic tribes of the Roman Empire before its downfall in 476, just as Napoleon invaded the German principalities of the Roman-German Empire before its downfall in 1806. Her historical drama, like all historical literary genres, drew parallels with her own time, characterizing Attila like Napoleon: an antithetical mix of barbarity and civility, vengefulness and forgiveness, asceticism and sybaritism, tenderness and cruelty and, above all, slavery to passion in love and war. Attila’s faithful counsellor Edezon vainly advises self-control and moderation in view of the extent of Attila’s empire, but Attila’s thirst for women and lands will not be slaked, although he has intimations that his Getriebenheit will be his death: Des Sieges Herrlichkeit werd ich noch heut empfinden, Doch meine Seele drückt’ ein ungewohnter Schmerz, […]633

Eventually his beloved Germanic princess Hildegrund, another split character uniting tenderness and cruelty, murders him for the liberation of her oppressed people. Günderrode’s readers, however, knew that new oppressors were waiting in the wings. Neither Alexander, Attila, nor Napoleon, or “after-warriors”, would learn the joint lessons of philosophy and experience. A slave to his own passions, ambition and bloodshed, Napoleon would leave his exile on Elba, resume power, and rush (or rather be irresistibly driven) to his second downfall and exile against his useless insight. His convictions of the baseness of man and the vanity of the 632 Byron, Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, lines 17–22. 633 Günderrode, Poetische Fragmente, Hildegund, 1805, lines 185–186, in: Sämtliche Werke und ausgewählte Studien, I. 95.

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world could not safeguard him against the illusions of his own greatness any more than Byron could himself, and he expressed his contemptus mundi again and again.634 After Napoleon’s second downfall Byron formulated this view in the third canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1816): An empire thou couldst crush, command, rebuild, But govern not thy pettiest passion, nor, However deeply in men’s spirits skill’d, Look through thine own, nor curb the lust of war, Nor learn that tempted Fate will leave the loftiest star.635

Later, in The Age of Bronze (1823), Byron added an even more discouraging thought to his conviction of man’s indocility. The unjust tyranny of fate would not even allow Napoleon to follow the ambition that led Washington and Bolivar to nobler fame (and a greater “dignity of fall”). The long erotema, or rhetorical question, underscores the complaint of a speaker subject to the same absurd conditio humana: Yet Vanity herself had better taught A surer path even to the fame he sought, By pointing out on history’s fruitless page Ten thousand conquerors for a single sage. […] Alas! why must the same Atlantic wave Which wafted freedom gird a tyrant’s grave – The king of kings, and yet of slaves the slave, Who burst the chains of millions to renew The very fetters which his arm broke through, And crushed the rights of Europe and his own To flit between a dungeon and a throne?636

In a number of alleged translations from the French, Byron intended to show French views of Napoleon in confirmation of his own. The French falsely expected Napoleon, the former revolutionary general, to be a champion of freedom as proclaimed in the French Revolution: “equal right and laws”.637 Instead, his ambition made him restore a new version of the old monarchy : Better hadst thou still been leading France o’er hosts of hirelings bleeding, 634 E. g. Byron, Lines addressed to the Rev. J.T. Becher, 1806, line 4: “I will not descend to a world I despise.” 635 Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 3. 38. 5–9. 636 Byron, The Age of Bronze, lines 241–244 and 253–259. The reference is to Napoleon’s grave on Saint Helena. 637 Byron, Ode from the French, line 81.

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Than sold thyself to death and shame For a meanly royal name.638

As a consequence, Byron’s Napoleon was vanquished by history, not by the Unholy Alliance and Wellington or Blücher, just as Grabbe’s Napoleon was vanquished by history and fate.639 Great men do not make history, but are either its useful tools or chanceless obstacles: The Chief has fallen, but not by you, Vanquishers of Waterloo. […] […] goaded by ambition’s sting, The Hero sunk into the King.640

In a dramatic monologue characterized by the contradiction between a lingering thirst for glory and profound insight, Byron made Napoleon himself admit this truth: I have warred with a world which vanquished me only When the meteor of conquest allured me too far.641

The imagery of meteors and will-o’-the-wisps, elusive or illusory lights luring men into fatal bogs and marshes, was common in Romantic Disillusionism. Apart from the irresistibility of their passions due to their split natures, men stand in need of such lights in a cold world. They dream of warmth and risk their lives for it, only to be disappointed and reawakened to the frosty reality. The idea, formulated as a universal truth at the beginning of the seventh canto of Byron’s Don Juan, is reminiscent of John Keats’s The Eve of St Agnes (1820), but without hope of overcoming frost in a warm love that points to a luminous world beyond: OH Love! Oh Glory! what are ye who fly Around us ever, rarely to alight? There’s not a meteor in the Polar sky Of such transcendant and more fleeting flight. Chill, and chained to cold earth, we lift on high Our eyes in search of either lovely light; A thousand and a thousand colours they Assume, then leave us on our freezing way.642 638 Ibid. lines 38–41. 639 Grabbe, Napoleon oder Die hundert Tage (1831), where Napoleon, whom the faithful Bertrand believes to be his ordering fate, must admit that he is himself fate’s fool and victim. Also see W. Link, Das Verhältnis von Mensch und Schicksal in Chr. D. Grabbes Dramen, unpublished PhD thesis, Heidelberg 1945, 124–125 and 147. 640 Byron, Ode from the French, lines 22–23. 641 Byron, Napoleon’s Farewell. [From the French], lines 5–6. 642 Byron, Don Juan, 7. 1. 1–8. Also cf. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 4. 124. 6–9.

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Napoleon cannot give up his idle hope of finally regaining his lost power, and the French (or any other people) cannot give up their idle hopes of finally regaining their lost freedom. Even the narrator himself, the poet’s persona speaking directly in the fourth canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, has outbursts of enthusiasm for freedom’s final victory, albeit discredited in his imagery : Yet, Freedom! yet thy banner, torn, but flying, Streams like the thunder-storm against the wind.643

And the warlike pirate, the speaker of Espronceda’s “Cancijn del pirata” (1836), implicitly admits that his longing and search for freedom lacks an aim. He implicitly admits that he is at the mercy of every change of the weather, and that (akin to Shelley’s Satan and Byron’s Lucifer) he seeks the establishment of his own power and legal code rather than his country’s freedom. He is somewhat nobler than the tyrants, particularly King Fernando VII of Spain, but far from noble or Prometheus-like, a disillusioning example of revolutionary history’s unavoidable criminality and circularity : ‘Y no hay playa, Sea cual quiera, Ni bandera De esplendor, Que no sienta Mi derecho Y d8 pecho A mi valor.’644

Another criminal, the narrator of Poe’s tale “The Imp of the Perverse” (1845), provides a rationale for such a lack of aim and purpose. He is a modern, sceptical phrenologist and convicted murderer facing execution, relating his own a posteriori experience with a cranial organ that traditional a priori theology and phrenology, with its deductive construction of a rational creation and consistent human nature, had been blind to. This innate “paradoxical something, which we may call perverseness”, had irresistibly driven him to confess to a murder that his reason had perfectly planned and executed. His brilliant intelligence and analytical reason had been incapable of safeguarding him from paradoxical selfbetrayal and self-destruction: In the sense I intend, it is, in fact, a mobile without motive, a motive not motivirt. Through its promptings we act without comprehensible object; or, if this shall be

643 Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 4. 98. 1–2. Byron’s own italics: the wind is necessarily stronger than the banner. 644 Espronceda, Cancijn del pirata, 1836, lines 41–48, I. 77–78.

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understood as a contradiction in terms, we may so far modify the proposition as to say, that through its promptings we act, for the reason that we should not.645

Conventional anthropology (Platonic, Aristotelian, and Christian) had for centuries taught man’s capacity for insight and the sovereignty of his reason over his passions. To exercise this control was an ethical postulation for man as the highest being of terrestrial creation endowed with a consistent nature – distinct from an animal nature – and made in the image of God. The favourite image for this control was that of navigation. Nautical metaphors were thus frequently employed by eighteenth-century writers to illustrate the moral character of man: man floats like a ship upon the sea of death, driven on by the winds of passion and steered by the helm of reason. They were central to the iconography of the Christian church: the only ship that guarantees man’s survival on the ocean of death, provided that he succeeds in navigating his life. The best known examples are to be found in Spectator 408 (1712) and Pope’s Essay on Man (1733–1734). What distinguished this traditional metaphor of the ship from Byron’s, Espronceda’s, and Heine’s, however, was its insistence on the presence of a helm, enabling the steersman to control and manoeuvre the ship even in strong gales, affirming the dominating power of reason. Byron deliberately modified the metaphor so as to omit the helm of reason, depicting man as being impelled by his dominating passion to a fate that he clearly foresees but cannot avoid. Throughout Don Juan, Byron’s speaker denies any possible influence of reason on the passions directing them to a projected end, as when he compares women in search of the man of their heart to helpless sailors running before the wind: Frail mariners afloat without a chart, They run before the wind through high seas breaking; And when they have made the shore through ev’ry shock, ’Tis odd, or odds, it may turn out a rock.646

Both life and writing appear as floating helplessly and aimlessly on an ocean of death between the extremes of passion and boredom, where man enjoys speculating on a longed-for harbour that is hidden from view. Byron’s imagery of languishing ennui, boredom and disgust relieved by outbreaks of passion anticipates a later favourite notion of Decadent poetry and prose: But, more or less, the whole’s a syncop8, Or a singultus – emblems of Emotion, The grand Antithesis to great Ennui, 645 Poe, The Imp of the Perverse, 1845, in: Collected Works, III. 1220. 646 Byron, Don Juan, 14. 74. 5–8. Note the striking parallel to the tragic end of the shipwreck’s last survivors, ibid. 2. 104. 1–8. For an application of the image to the nature of man see Byron’s self-fashioning in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 3. 2. 1–9.

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Wherewith we break our bubbles on the ocean, That Watery Outline of Eternity, Or miniature at least, as is my notion, Which ministers unto the soul’s delight, In seeing matters which are out of sight.647

Neither is the ship in Coleridge’s “Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” (1798) navigable, exposed to indomitable and uncanny powers both from above (storm and calm) and below where the skeletons of ships and men lie mouldering. This nautical Gothic is, however, Christian Gothic in the sense of Psalm 42, 7, showing the weakness of man at the mercy of a benevolent God. “Deep calleth unto deep”, but God will save the ship’s souls as he will come to men’s aid in their darkest and most desperate hours. In the Negative Romantics’ universe, by contrast, it is inevitable that man is shipwrecked sooner or later ; the gales of passion must one day drive his helmless, unnavigable ship onto the rocks. The Byronic hero is proudly and defiantly ready to accept this unjust fate, renouncing all wishful thinking, all false religious consolation, and disbelieving all world myths constructing meaning on a senseless, aimless life. Lermontov’s Demon, the eponymous Byronic hero of his Oriental verse tale of 1829–1841, thus describes himself as a type of fallen man exiled from paradise: An outcast on an unknown world; Helpless as some dismantled bark That drifts at random through the dark, Or like the ragged cloud-rack driven As the wind lists athwart the heaven; Still travelling on, without a goal Or port or rest, from pole to pole.648

This heretically subverted the Judaeo-Christian myth of Jonah, which teaches the divine purpose of shipwreck and suffering. Jonah sought to disobey God by escaping on a ship, and God sent a storm to wreck the ship and a whale to swallow him (antithesis), so that he could atone for his sin and be delivered (synthesis). Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) followed the same model, with a hero who disobeyed the will of God and his father being shipwrecked, castaway on an island to atone for his sins before being delivered. The very vocabulary of the shipwreck has assumed religious meaning in terms of theodicy : “shipwreck”, “castaway”, “deliverance”. Biblical shipwreck, like the biblical stone of stumbling, shows a moral and ordered universe. Two years after the publication of Coleridge’s “Rhyme of the Ancient Mari647 Byron, Don Juan, 15. 2. 1–8. 648 Lermontov, 5V]_^, MS 1829–1841, publ. posth. 1856, X, transl. anon. in: Third Millennium Library. Internet Database. Last accessed 27 April 2013.

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ner” in Lyrical Ballads (1798), Mary Robinson published her contrastive Gothic counterpiece in her Lyrical Tales (1800), “The Haunted Beach”. The title of Robinson’s collection alone indicates her answer to the previous work.649 An English pirate ship on a morally dubious state expedition for the legalized robbery of Spanish gold had been shipwrecked “Upon a lonely desart Beach”, with a “Shipwreck’d Mariner” as its sole, chance survivor. A poor “Fisherman” living in a little shed murdered the mariner out of greed instead of providing Christian help, and now the wreck of the pirate ship lies mouldering in the water, the murdered man lies mouldering in the fisherman’s shed, the spectres of drowned sailors dance their rounds on the water in the pale moonlight, and the dissonant screech of curlews joins the deafening roar of the billows. The mariner had tied himself to a mast, but this act of “re-ligio” would not help on a pirate ship, the very contrary of the Christian ship of salvation on the ocean of death. Robinson’s poem was inspired by her seeing the body of a “wretched outcast” brought on shore by fishermen, unheeded by the bathers, refused a Christian burial, and finally “covered by a heap of stones without the ceremony of a prayer”.650 Biographical experience thus again invalidated idealistic theology and philosophy. Instead of the successful repentance and wandering Ahasveric social mission of Coleridge’s mariner, Robinson’s poem ends on a note of despair and in stagnation instead of soteriological progress. Robinson’s mariner is dead, and his murderer remains fixed to the spot where he had committed his crime, all alone by the wide sea and unrelieved of his loneliness, with a weak will and mind unable to break the spell that binds him to his victim’s corpse: Full thirty years his task had been Day after day more weary ; For Heav’n design’d, his guilty mind Should dwell on prospects dreary. Bound by a strong and mystic chain, He has not pow’r to stray ; But, destin’d mis’ry to sustain, He wastes, in Solitude and Pain – A loathsome life away.651

In accordance with her female Biedermeier, Letitia Elizabeth Landon subverts the myth more subtly, whereas Byron and Robinson discredit it more radically. 649 For the poetic exchange between Robinson and Coleridge see Judith Pascoe’s detailed introduction to her edition of Robinson’s Selected Poems, 58–59. 650 Related by the anonymous biographer in Robinson’s posthumous Memoirs (2 vols. London 1803), quoted from Duncan Wu (ed.), Romanticism: An Anthology, 3rd edn. Oxford 2006, 248. 651 Robinson, Lyrical Tales, The Haunted Beach, 1800, lines 73–82, in: Selected Poems, ed. cit. 219–220.

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Her literary ballad “The Wreck” (1835) contrasts with “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” in its omission both of biblical dimensions and the themes of guilt, remorse, atonement, and regeneration. God is not as much explicitly denied as totally absent. As opposed to Coleridge’s ballad, with its Ancient Mariner as narrator and its Wedding Guest as narratee, both reformed by suffering, Landon’s ballad shows the ultimate impotence of man’s will and skill. Her reader will not rise “a sadder and a wiser man” after hearing the amoral tale of a senseless shipwreck in an amoral universe. Like Coleridge’s ship, Landon’s leaves the harbour full of joy, pride, and confidence. It is commanded by an able, battle-hardened captain who trusts his experience in navigation: With steps of power, and with steps of pride, The lord of the vessel paced The deck, as he thought on the waves below, And the glorious heaven he faced.652

Neither the murder of an albatross nor any other sin makes him fear heaven’s punishment, nor does a dark cloud or sharp wind warn him of imminent danger. His vague presentiment of peril is purely instinctive, almost animalistic: But, like life, the sea was false, and hid The cold dark rock from sight.653

The ship sinks with all her souls; not one will see home again to tell the world a moral tale. The sun rises again, shining indifferently on the spot where the ship has sunk without a promise of resurrection: There was no dark cloud on the morning sky, No fierce wind on the morning air ; The sun shone over the proud ship’s track, But no proud ship was there!654

A more seminal and openly provocative challenge to the myth of the purposeful shipwreck was provided in the chaotic shipwreck-scene in Byron’s Don Juan,655 which was based on a well-known, recent occurrence, and also boldly subverted 652 Landon, The Vow of the Peacock and Other Poems, The Wreck, lines 13–16, London 1835, 249. 653 Ibid. lines 51–52 and 252. 654 Ibid. lines 57–60, 253. 655 Byron, Don Juan, 2. 26–111. It was inspired by the famous shipwreck of and cannibalism on the French frigate Medusa in 1816, painted in Th8odore G8ricault’s Le radeau de la M8duse (1819), and which became the subject of EugHne Delacroix’s Le Naufrage de Don Juan (1841). Both paintings underscore chaos and aimlessness. For a fantastic treatment of the theme see William Thomas Moncrieff ’s extremely popular play The Shipwreck of the Medusa (Royal Coburg Theatre 1820); Frederick Burwick, Romantic Drama: Acting and Reacting, Cambridge 2009, 73–78.

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the traditional belief in the control of human passions by human reason in general. Here, as elsewhere, a pious myth is confronted with a brutal reality. Exiled from Seville through the intrigues of his bigoted mother, the young, inexperienced Juan sails for France on “the most holy Trinidada”.656 A cluster of religious connotations serves the purpose of casting doubt on religious constructions of meaning. The varied social mix of the ship’s passengers represents society in a nutshell, mirroring the pious society of Seville, which is then exposed to an extreme stress which breaks the cultural varnish, revealing the falseness of its faith, values, and conventions. The most holy Trinidada turns out to be a ship of fools. The behaviour of the shipwrecked is unreasonable to an extent that verges on the absurd and anticipates the behaviour of men in the novels of Joseph Conrad and H.G. Wells.657 Dominated by the ruling passion of self-preservation, the shipwrecked are unable to coordinate their efforts and act with circumspection and foresight, as reason would have dictated in their situation. “Men, even when dying, dislike inanition”,658 but their activity, the natural result of passion, is individually chaotic, blind, and devoid of all rational control, necessarily leading to their destruction. Even those who launch the boat, instead of praying, lashing themselves, tearing their hair, cursing the day of their birth, or putting on their best clothes as if going to a fair, are too confused and intoxicated with rum to take the most basic precautions. The preposterous storing and tackling of the longboat, the ravenous devouring of the meagre provisions, the loathsome and suicidal cannibalism culminating in the slaughter of Pedrillo, the final madness for land and foolish overloading of the boat – all these absurdities of behaviour present a view of human nature completely at odds with eighteenth-century rational philosophy and latitudinarian theology. The helmless, uncontrollable longboat, at the mercy of the wind and waves, is a perfect image of the incapability of its souls to save their lives by exercising any rational control over their passions. This applies to all the shipwrecked on board – the noblemen, the valets, the clergymen, the surgeons, the artisans, the sailors, the old and the young, the learned and the illiterate – presenting, as indicated above, a microcosm of human society in all its gradations and varieties. The shipwreck episode thus has strong affinities with the literary motif of the ship of fools – to a greater or lesser extent, all on board are fools, as seen from a rational point of view. Juan certainly surpasses most of the other passengers both in courage and in goodness, as when he prevents them from further intoxication, and when he hesitates to dine on 656 Ibid. 2. 24. 1. 657 E. g. the shipwreck of the Patna in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900) and the great Fishbourne fire in H.G. Wells’s The History of Mr Polly (1910). 658 Byron, Don Juan, 2. 46. 5.

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Pedrillo’s dead body despite of the threat of starvation. However, he neither thinks of reasonably tackling and storing the longboat, nor does he attempt to restrain others from such foolish actions as devouring their whole provision and oversetting the boat on a rock near the shore. Juan, it is true, remains the only survivor, but he owes his arrival on shore and subsequent recovery to mere good luck; had the shark not carried off his neighbour instead of him, and had the longboat’s brittle oar not been washed into his arms just at the moment when his strength forsook him, he never would have arrived on shore. Even then, he owes his quick recovery to the accidental presence and the sexual drives of the beautiful Haid8e walking out on the beach. Beyond this mere contingency of events, Haid8e’s charitable help in need is inspired not by Plato or Christ but by the instincts of nature hidden under a thin layer of pious hypocrisy and self-deception: And walking out upon the beach, below The cliff, towards sunset, on that day she found, Insensible, – not dead, but nearly so, – Don Juan, almost famish’d, and half drown’d; But being naked, she was shock’d, you know, Yet deem’d herself in common pity bound, As far as in her lay, ‘to take him in, A stranger’ dying, with so white a skin.659

John Clare radicalized this view of life’s socially necessary mendacity in Byron’s stanzas by concluding that Byron could not help but deceive himself. For Clare, three Byrons existed: the celebrated poet, the collusive masquerader, and himself.660 Hospitalized in his Epping Forest asylum, only the madman had the freedom to pull off the sane (though really insane) world’s mask of hypocrisy. Clare’s sexual drive, one incompatible with gospel education and which made him secretly visit prostitutes in London, is here alluded to in a distinctively Clarean remake of the stanza of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: This life is made of lying & grimace This world is filled with whoring & deceiving Hypocrisy ne’er masks an honest face Story’s are told – but seeing is believing & I’ve seen much from which there’s no retrieving I’ve seen deception take the place of truth I’ve seen knaves flourish – and the country grieving

659 Ibid. 2. 129. 1–8. The reference in quotation-marks is to the biblical command of entertaining strangers. 660 Burwick, Poetic Madness and the Romantic Imagination, 266.

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Lies was the current gospel in my youth & now a man – I’m further off from truth.661

Clare’s stanza recalls many pronouncements of Byron on cant as opposed to variety, as in Don Juan where Byron complained of critics that blamed him for saying “too much truth” like Smollett, Prior, Ariosto, and Fielding –662 or in his letter to John Murray on the Reverend William Lisle Bowles’s strictures on Pope: The truth is, that in these days the great “primum mobile” of England is Cant – Cant political – Cant poetical – Cant religious – Cant moral – but always Cant – multiplied through all the varieties of life.663

Clare’s concept of the poet’s ethic followed Byron’s in his insistence on honesty unadulterated by political correctness and the admission of variety unrestricted by dogma. After all, Clare too had good personal cause to admit the weakness of man’s reason in its attempt at controlling man’s impulses: Many are poets – though they use no pen To show their labours to the shuffling age Real poets must be truly honest men Tied to no mongrel laws […]664

In their poetry and prose Byron and Clare were pre-modern in many ways, which explains the rediscovery of the forgotten Clare in the twentieth century. Schopenhauer, an attentive reader of his contemporary Byron,665 formulated Byron’s sceptical inversion of the traditional roles of the will and the mind in his philosophy. Schopenhauer’s Will to live is a blind man who carries the whole of life (including reason) on his back, and man is deceived to believe that he can steer his own course. The Will is the master, reason the servant. Schopenhauer elaborated Byron’s imagery to illustrate pious man’s self-deceptive confidence that the ship of faith will be his individual salvation, even in plain view of the fact that life’s seething ocean controls him in spite of his helm and “re-ligio” (in the literal sense of the individual sailor’s safe fixation on board): Denn, wie auf dem tobenden Meere, das, nach allen Seiten unbegrenzt, heulend Wasserberge erhebt und senkt, auf einem Kahn ein Schiffer sitzt, dem schwachen 661 Clare, Child Harold, MS ca 1840–1841, lines 526–534, in: Later Poems 1837–1864, ed. cit. I. 59. 662 Byron, Don Juan, 4. 97–98. 663 Byron, Letter to John Murray, 7 February 1821, in: Complete Miscellaneous Prose, ed. Andrew Nicholson, Oxford 1991, 128. 664 Clare, Child Harold, lines 1–4, in: Later Poems 1837–1864, ed. cit. I. 40. 665 For Schopenhauer’s autograph annotations in the Byron volumes of his private library see Arthur Hübscher (ed.), Arthur Schopenhauer : Der handschriftliche Nachlass, Frankfurt am Main 1966–1975, V. 454–455.

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Fahrzeug vertrauend; so sitzt, mitten in einer Welt voll Qualen, ruhig der einzelne Mensch, gestützt und vertrauend auf das principium individuationis […]666

Moreover, Byron’s portrait of man’s regression into cannibalism takes much the same atavistic view of human civilization as Joseph Conrad’s later novel Heart of Darkness (1899, 1902) and Freud’s treatise Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (1930). Civilization and control are not innate in man but constructed, superimposed, incapable of controlling his blind emotions and drives. Metaphorically speaking, the ship of man’s life on the ocean of death is no protecting church and has a chart and helm that are no use in stormy weather. The time-honoured, pious image of the ship on the cruise of life was akin to that of the pilgrimage of life, as allegorized in Guillaume de Digulleville’s Le pHlerinage de la vie humaine (ca 1330) and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678–1684). Both cruise and pilgrimage had aims, a haven and a shrine, rewarding man for hardships along the way and for overcoming aberrations. In biblical myth, the Israelites wandered and suffered for 40 years to be finally restored to their Holy Land; and, in classical myth, Ulysses sailed and suffered for many years to be finally restored to his native Ithaca. The Positive Romantic version of the life-pilgrim was the restless quester, with his Romantic Sehnsucht, Heimweh, and Wanderlust, who feels his exile on earth and whose innate sense of a lost home in the world beyond causes him to strive back towards the ideal. Joseph von Eichendorff ’s famous poem “Dryander mit der Komödiantenbande” (1834), inserted in one his Romantic novels, gives expression to this yearning for Paradise Regained in terms of Plato’s theatrum mundi metaphor from Nomoi: Mich brennt’s an meinen Reiseschuhn Fort mit der Zeit zu schreiten – Was sollen wir agieren nun Vor so viel klugen Leuten? Es hebt das Dach sich von dem Haus Und die Kulissen rühren. Und strecken sich zum Himmel ’raus, Strom, Wälder musizieren! […] Und keiner kennt den letzten Akt Von allen, die da spielen, Nur der da oben schlägt den Takt, Weiß, wo das hin will zielen.667 666 Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, § 63. 667 Eichendorff, Dichter und ihre Gesellen, 1834, book I, chapter 7, lines 1–8 and 17–20, in: Ausgewählte Werke, 934–935. The Greek name Dryander (oak-man) may refer to Eichen-

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In the wake of Byron’s Childe Harold, the Negative Romantic counter-version was the fl.neur, in the sense of disorientated and aimless Geworfenheit and Getriebenheit. Heine’s indifference where the aimless pilgrimage of life would end sounds satirical of religious promises of a sense and aim in life, but bears the stamp of the tragedy of loss, with its amalgamation of question marks and resigned self-consolation: Wo wird einst des Wandermüden Letzte Ruhestätte sein? Unter Palmen in dem Süden? Unter Linden an dem Rhein? Werd ich wo in einer Wüste Eingescharrt von fremder Hand? Oder ruh ich an der Küste Eines Meeres in dem Sand? Immerhin! Mich wird umgeben Gotteshimmel, dort wie hier, Und als Totenlampen schweben Nachts die Sterne über mir.668

In contrast to the pious medieval legend of Tannhäuser, who successfully repented to correct his aberration from the path to God through his temporary excesses of illicit love in the Venusberg, Heine’s modern Tannhäuser neither has an aim nor finds earthly calm in love or religion. In the Venusberg, he longs for Rome, and in Rome he longs for the Venusberg, being forever on the move. This is underscored by the open end to Heine’s Der Tannhäuser (1836), which breaks off in the middle as the returned Tannhäuser relates his travels to Venus. He will go to Rome again, but Rome, and the Heavenly Jerusalem, are no longer possible final destinations on the ups and downs of life’s itinerary. Baudelaire’s fl.neur, in Le peintre de la vie moderne (1863), is also a sharp Kontrafaktur to the wanderer or pilgrim to a Paradise Regained in the next world. Baudelaire’s fl.neur, like the narrator and follower of Poe’s man of the crowd, is a mere kaleidoscopic observer of disconnected and fragmentary scenes of human nature and behaviour, “toujours voyageant / travers le grand d8sert de l’homme”.669 If he possesses the additional quality of expression, as the draftsman Constantin Guys (1802–1892), he is an artist, a painter of modern life with dorff himself. Cf. the life motto of the pious German Romantic novelist Heinrich JungStilling, “Selig sind, die das Heimweh haben, denn sie sollen nach Hause kommen”, inscribed on a church in his native Hilchenbach. 668 Heine, Wo?, MS ca 1839–1849, in: Sämtliche Schriften, IV. 483–484. 669 Baudelaire, Le peintre de la vie moderne, 1863, 1163.

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its unclassical disruption, unclassical rapidity, and ultimate mortality. Whereas Wordsworth’s and Eichenorff ’s solitary wanderer has an aim in a purposeful world, as well as in one beyond, and runs through experiences that make him grow to a higher being, man or poet or artist, Baudelaire’s fl.neur resembles Byron’s pilgrim and De Quincey’s opium-eater in erratic aimlessness and segmented experiences, which deny him the connected linearity and teleology of a bildungsroman. Where Wordsworth’s and Eichendorff ’s solitary wanderer is alone but not lonely in the society of nature’s many forms and symbols, Baudelaire’s fl.neur is as lonely as his dandy is cold, observing though not participating. He has a childlike na"vet8 that allows him to see the most mundane things afresh, yet this childlike perspective lacks the metaphysical quality of Blake’s and Wordsworth’s concept of prophetic childhood. He is impelled by an unquiet instinct, which he cannot resist, rather than by a calling from beyond. His ephemeral observations aestheticize deformity, in the tradition of die schwarze Romantik, and have no claim to the creation of a physical beauty pointing to eternity. His art consists in form-giving, the Parnassian maquillage imposed upon chaos. His narration produces a confused heap of separate scenes, rather than pearls strung logically on a thread, just as De Quincey’s methods of narration in Confessions on an English Opium-Eater (1822) and Suspiria de Profundis (1845) are Shandyesque, freely rambling, strongly idiosyncratic, and confusing for a reader on the lookout for an aim. His life, too, is a lonely dandy’s artificial work of art, trying to surmount “spleen” through alcohol and drugs. Later, in Walter Pater’s historical bildungsroman Marius the Epicurean (1885), the protagonist’s spiritual journey from the old religion of Numa to young Christianity is certainly less tortuous. However, the aesthetic experience continues to predominate; no final destination is reached and no religious question as to a world beyond is answered, in accordance with Pater’s concept of life as an ecstatic, open-ended process doubting all objective cognition of lasting truths and eschewing all dogmatism, based on the scepticism of Heraclitus, Aristippus, and Epicurus.670 The end of life is life itself, the maximum enjoyment of the fleeting moment, “To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy”.671 Had Marius not died young in an early Roman Christian community he would have wandered on, searching. In Positive Romanticism, the ideal beyond was often imagined as a beautiful woman or princesse lointaine, such as Mathilde in Novalis’s unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802) envisaged in the prophetic dream of the “blue flower”, a symbol of all Romantic longing. This old literary motif of the vision of and longing for union with a remote, redemptive idol in the form of an ideal 670 Pater, Marius the Epicurean: 1885, chapter 8 Animula Vagula, in: Works, ed. cit. II. 127–147. 671 Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, Conclusion, 1873, ed. cit. I. 236.

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woman, or ferne Geliebte, rediscovered in Romanticism672 found its best-known expression in the concluding lines of the second part of Goethe’s Faust (1832): “Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan”.673 To the Positive Romantic priest-poet whose duty was to keep his vision alive in an adult age of growing materialism, that beautiful woman could also turn out to be a femme fatale drawing the poet away from his duty to a lonely death. This is the case in Percy Shelley’s Alastor, or, The Spirit of Solitude (1816). But to the Positive Romantic, such danger invalidated neither the possibility nor the necessity of visions of the ideal. In a much-quoted letter to Benjamin Bailey, Keats confessed his belief in the truth of dream visions, such as Adam’s dream in Milton’s Paradise Lost, mantic oneiric cognition above all ratiocination.674 By contrast, the vision of Hoffmann’s Theodor, who imagines a princesse lointaine confined in a barren house, is both deceptive and mentally unbalancing, and the mirror or Claude glass in which he observes her is no longer the traditional mirror symbolizing perception of concealed truth.675 On the contrary, it stands instead for confusion and madness, being used both by the monomaniac patient and his psychiatrist. The motif recurs in G8rard de Nerval’s short novels Sylvie (1853) and Aur8lia (posth. 1855), featuring three women: a first love, the very real Sylvie with her firm location in the Valois, on the one hand, and two second loves, the inaccessible and mythical Adrienne and the remote actress Aur8lie, on the other. The amorous narrator and theatre goer, with his strong imagination and inclination to visions, ultimately loses them all. His “chimHres” – the title of the sonnets published together with Sylvie in Les Filles du Feu (1854) – are shortlived, and he repeatedly awakens to a banal reality that he himself had invested with the nimbus of a world beyond. His lost Adrienne, he discovers, has died as a nun in a convent and his new love, whom he believes to be Adrienne’s reincarnation – the actress Aur8lie, alias Jenny Colon – succeeds in convincing him (and his readers) that he had discarded his earthbound Sylvie and idealized both Adrienne and Aur8lie in order to satisfy his raving and dreaming romantic “nostalgie de l’8tranger”. The princesse lointaine proves to be merely an illusion, a creature of the deluded narrator’s “desiring phantasy” rather than a true metaphysical apocalypse. The disillusion is relived again and again. In Aur8lia ou le rÞve la vie it becomes even clearer that the mad narrator’s oneiric and mystical visions originate in his vain, self-destructive desire to escape “du sein du d8sespoir”676. After the death of Aur8lie (Jenny Colon died in 1842), he seeks 672 Elisabeth Frenzel, Motive der Weltliteratur, Das heimgeholte Fernidol, 149–160. 673 The lines are spoken by the invisible and authoritative Chorus Mysticus. 674 Keats, Letter to Benjamin Bailey, 22 November 1817, in: Letters, ed. cit. I. 185. Keats’s reference is to Milton, Paradise Lost, book 8, lines 283 seqq. 675 Hoffmann, Nachtstücke, Das öde Haus, 1816–1817, in Sämtliche poetischen Werke, I. 744. 676 Nerval, Aur8lia, MS 1854, in: Œuvres, I. 413.

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consolation in Dante’s Vita nuova and Swedenborg’s Memorabilia. He admits, however, that his dreams of a continuation of life in a world beyond are due to feverish overexcitement and wishful thinking rather than firm beliefs – a modern, sceptical Vita nuova and Memorabilia where the limits of madness and sanity are no longer clearly marked: J’8tais si heureux du soulagement que j’8prouvais, que je faisais part de ma joie / tous mes amis, et, dans mes lettres, je leur donnais pour l’8tat constant de mon esprit ce qui n’8tait que surexcitation fi8vreuse.677

The psychiatrist, Dr Blanche, fails in his repeated attempts to bring his patient down from his sick “chimHres” of a divine Aur8lia to a non-fantastic, worldly commitment.678 The narrator is a semi-autobiographical portrait of the Byron admirer Nerval himself, who was a patient of Dr Blanche’s, visiting his houses on Montmartre and in Passy, and who, two years later, ended his tormented life in suicide. In the way of modern tragicomedy, the ideal of the princesse lointaine is ridiculed in Büchner’s Leonce und Lena (MS 1836–1837) where the ideal is replaced with absurd chance contrary to all vision, reason, or expectation. The eponymous hero’s vision is broad satire: “Ich habe das Ideal eines Frauenzimmers in mir und muß es suchen. Sie ist unendlich schön und unendlich geistlos”.679 The case of Büchner’s Dantons Tod (MS 1835) provides a parallel, albeit in a tragic context and genre. Danton feels the holistic, reintegrative impulse associated with the vision and love of an ideal woman, but, in reality, his dreams always relapse into carnal desires for various women, including whores, with all of whom he can communicate physically, though never intellectually. In a universe without ideal realities beyond, spiritual desires cannot find any gratification and must seek vulgar satisfaction in material realities: sex, food, and drink. This is also the quite realistic observation of Byron, the gay narrator of Don Juan masquerading as a heterosexual,680 in his comment on his young and foolishly platonizing hero’s vain efforts at seeking the metaphysical foundation of his adulterous love for Donna Julia. Unmasking an ideal as a mere bubble of the brain or downright hypocrisy was a standard technique in the Classical Tradition’s Streitkultur. Byron’s satire on Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s Positive Romanticism consists in toppling the dreaming Juan – who wanders “by the glassy brooks” thinking “unutterable things” – from the heights of his spiritual 677 Ibid. 160. 678 Esprit Sylvestre Blanche (1796–1852) was a famous and successful psychiatrist of the Romantic Period who treated many poets, musicians, and artists in his house and in the circle of his family on the principle of Philippe Pinel’s “traitement moral”. 679 Büchner, Leonce und Lena, II/1, in: Sämtliche Werke, 128. 680 Jonathan David Gross, Byron: The Erotic Liberal, Lanham MD and Oxford 2001, 129–152.

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search to the depths of physical desire and sexual gratification.681 Byron the narrator’s Epicureanism hence closely resembles Büchner’s: Let us have wine and woman, mirth and laughter, Sermons and soda-water the day after.682

In both Büchner’s Danton’s Tod and Byron’s Don Juan this includes weak man’s irresistible, atavistic desire for blood. Byron’s shipwrecks and Büchner’s revolutionaries relapse into an insatiable cannibalism, together with an immoderate hunger and thirst.683 Extreme situations remove the varnish of civilization from man, thus giving the lie to all theology and idealist philosophy. In Byron’s early oriental tale The Giaour (1813), this atavism manifests itself in man’s irresistible hunger and thirst for revenge in connection with his following of the ignis fatuus of paradisiacal love. The Giaour, a Christian among Turks, knows that Hassan’s Circassian slave Leila could not but love him, and that the jealous Hassan could not but order her death, and that he could not but slay Hassan in revenge, yet admits that had he been Hassan he would have acted in the same way. In an unrepentant confession of his life’s crimes to a fellow friar he also uses insurmountable prejudices that keep bloodshed alive in an unreformable world: both Christians and Muslims have abusive names for “infidels” and, casting them as enemies, believe that their murder will take them straight to Paradise. Ultimately, the Christian and the Muslim is the other’s alter ego both in love and hate; victims of the same chaotic nature of man and constitution of the world as expressed in the tale’s fragmentary narration. Much the same applies to Alp the Venetian Renegade in The Siege of Corinth (1816), who has given up Christianity for Islam, the Venetian for the Turkish side, yet finds belief and consolation in neither and thus a home nowhere. Both victim and criminal, he has experienced injustice and tyranny on both sides: a pre-Decadent grand abandonn8 epitomizing the basic situation of man in the world.684 Christians and Muslims die in the same general carnage at the end of the sad tale, all love and war proving in vain for men of all religions and nations.685 It is such knowledge and experience of universal injustice that also makes Byron’s disorientated Giaour, with his dark scowl, haughty mien and penetrating eyes, an unhappy outcast, even when he retires into the Christian community of a monastery, confessing his guilt and sins for which he cannot be held responsible: 681 Byron, Don Juan, 1. 90–92. For a detailed interpretation of the scene see below. 682 Ibid. 2. 178. 7–8. 683 Also cf. Camille Desmoulins’s desperate exclamation in Büchner, Dantons Tod, act II, 33: “Pathetischer gesagt, würde es heißen: wie lange soll die Menschheit in ewigem Hunger ihre eigenen Glieder fressen? oder: wie lange sollen wir Schiffbrüchige auf einem Wrack in unlöschbarem Durst einander das Blut aus den Adern saugen?” 684 Byron, The Siege of Corinth, stanza 4. 685 Ibid. stanza 33.

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‘She died – I dare not tell thee how, But look – ’tis written on my brow! There read of Cain the curse and crime, In characters unworn by time: Still, ere thou dost condemn me – pause – Not mine the act, though I the cause; Yet did he but what I had done Had she been false to more than one; Faithless to him – he gave the blow, But true to him, I laid him low.’686

The Giaour and Alp are renegades that never reach a fixed identity, remaining disorientated between Christian and Muslim, patriot and traitor, culprit and victim. They vary as do their stories’ changing narrators’ points of view. They might reflect the time’s fascination with a real multiple renegade, Mar8chal Michel Ney, who deserted from Napoleon to the Bourbons and back again to Napoleon, only to lose the battle with him at Waterloo. In such texts the Positive Romantic and Platonic order of the real and the ideal is reversed: the ideal is a dangerous ignis fatuus, or a mere bubble of the brain, the real is bleak, inescapable antithesis and finality. In Nerval’s poetry and prose this inversion is insistent, as in his ChimHres-sonnet “El Desdichado” (1854), where the desolate, half-mad, and pained speaker complains of his treacherous visions. He has no fixed identity, is heavily depressed, and unfortunate in all respects. He is Lusignan sentenced to lose his adored Melusina, and he is Byron sentenced to wander lonely in exile – all three being punished for dreams of ideals unattainable in this life. The sonnet has been analyzed psychoanalytically as being expressive of a “black-sun” Romanticism (Byron, Heine, Nerval), revealing the instability of subjects that have not completed detachment from the mother :687 Je suis le T8n8breux, – le Veuf, – l’Inconsol8, Le Prince d’Aquitaine / la Tour aboli: Ma seule Ptoile est morte, – et mon luth constell8 Porte le Soleil noir de la M8lancholie. […] Suis-je Amour ou Phœbus? … Lusignan ou Biron? Mon front est rouge encor du baiser de la Reine, J’ai rÞv8 dans la Grotte oF nage la SyrHne …688 686 Byron, The Giaour, 1813, lines 1056–1065. 687 Julia Kristeva, Soleil noir : D8pression et m8lancholie, Paris 1987. 688 Nerval, Les ChimHres, El Desdichado, lines1–4, 9–11, in: Œuvres, I. 3. In his final prose tale, La Pandora (1853–1854), Nerval replaced the myth of the divine with that of the fatal woman and saw himself as the tragically frustrated Prometheus of Negative Romanticism, who will but cannot save mankind: “O Jupiter! quand finira mon supplice?” (I. 356).

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In a much earlier poem on Byron’s philosophy of life, later included in his Odelettes (1853), Nerval had elaborated on his kinship with the disillusioned English poet, whom he thought to have been mentally insane like himself, “Pens8e de Byron” (first version 1827). The uplifting wine in the cup of life had turned out to be a dangerous poison confusing judgment, and the chivalrous ideals of love and glory that had enticed the speaker prove to be vain illusions – the subject of the next chapter : Trop longtemps 8pris d’un vain songe, Gloire! amour! vous e0tes mon cœur : < Gloire! tu n’es qu’un mensonge; Amour! tu n’es point le bonheur!689

In Büchner’s Woyzeck, the life-sustaining but illusory character of such ideal ignes fatui is exemplified in the Byronic Grandmother’s Tale, in which a poor orphan child who innocently pursues a falsely promising moon and sun, experiences nothing but rot and disease, and finds only isolation again when returned to earth.690 Disappointed by “either lovely light”, we are left alone “on our freezing way”.691 The Negative Romantic version of the life-pilgrim and his journey denied any metaphysically orientated soul naturally seeking a metaphysical aim and finding it in symbolic, anamnetic dreams. Büchner’s heroes and heroines are errant contemporaries who neither have nor find an aim. Childe Harold, Byron’s bestknown pilgrim, is a “self-exiled” hero whose agitation is not the result of his being exiled from his home in a world beyond, but of his Geworfenheit; the very lack of such a “religious” hold. His pilgrimage hence has no aim, and neither a city nor a shrine, any more than the Wanderschaft of the self-exiled narrator of Wilhelm Müller’s Die Winterreise (1824) or the suicidal miller of his Die schöne Müllerin (1821). At the end of their absurd pilgrimages, these wanderers fade away into nothingness. The miller will possibly hang himself on the invitation of the boughs of a lime tree, or be drowned in a brook that offers him final rest from both joy and grief in a cool, deep grave far removed from Heaven. It is with the cold earth alone that faithful, lasting love lies in conjugal sleep, “Bis das Meer will trinken die Bächlein aus”.692 The miller’s prognosticated suicide is comparable to the deserted wife’s suicide in Felicia Heman’s “Indian Woman’s Death Song” (1828): both make the anti-Wordsworthian experience that trust in this world’s 689 Nerval, Pl8gies nationales, Pens8e de Byron, 1827, lines 37–40, in: Œuvres, I. 21. 690 Büchner, Woyzeck, 172. This is a parody of pious German fairy tales told in the Grimms’ collection, Die sieben Raben and Sterntaler. 691 Byron, Don Juan, 7. 1. 1–8. Cf. above. 692 Müller, Gedichte aus den hinterlassenen Papieren eines reisenden Waldhornisten, I (1820, 1826), Die schöne Müllerin, Des Baches Wiegenlied, lines 4–6, in: Gedichte, 21.

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nature does not heal except in death, in the “glorious bowers where none are heard to weep”.693 And Childe Harold will possibly be drowned at sea, the meaning of which is perverted by Byron from the Christian symbol of eternity to a neopagan symbol for the final victory of death. Bernard Blackstone is most certainly incorrect in claiming that Byron’s great address to the ocean which closes Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage694 leaves us with an exhilarating sense of new possibilities.695 According to the oceanic theory of the earth, all differentiated life came from the ocean and returns to it; the ocean alone is homogeneous and undifferentiated; and heterogeneously mixed man strives for a return to unity without making the distinction between self and other – a regressive Freudian and Lacanian death wish.696 Byron’s stanza on his love of swimming in the ocean has connotations of fatality rather than vitalism,697 anticipating both Swinburne’s ecstatic but suicidal embracing of the ocean as the fatal mother and Lautr8amont’s satanic litany in praise of the ocean in the first canto of his Sadean Maldoror (1868). If it is true that Byron modelled his stanzas on a passage from the first book of Germaine de Sta[l’s widely read novel Corinne ou l’Italie (1807), he radically changed its purpose, perverting the novel’s Positive Romantic view of the ocean as a catalyst for religious thoughts into a Negative Romantic catalyst for scepticism. Sta[l’s ocean is seen from the vantage point of a church on a mountain top, in the tradition of Christian iconography, whereas Byron’s ocean has no such pious associations.698 The metaphorical iconography of the church, with its “nave” the only truly safe and indestructible ship protecting man in the storms of life – a commonplace of Christian tradition – is provocatively omitted. Byron’s ocean symbolizes a ruinous force stronger than man’s weak will and mind, the glorious mirror and image of God the Almighty Tyrant, bringing a decay which marred “Alike the Armada’s pride, or spoils of Trafalgar”699 and “dried up realms to desarts”,700 a brutal power destroying everything and regenerating nothing. As such, it recurs at the end of Mary Shelley’s second novel, Valperga (1823). It also calls to mind, and may have inspired, Schopenhauer’s comparison of a believer to a sailor clinging to his weak vessel in the face of indomitable ocean storms. Ocean, brook, tree, mill-wheel, and travel, the standard repertoire of an uplifting, purposeful, and soteriological Romantic 693 Hemans, Records of Woman, Indian Woman’s Death Song, 1828, line 40, in Wu (ed.), Romantic Women Poets, 553. 694 Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 4. 179–184. 695 B. Blackstone, Byron: A Survey, 293. 696 Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy : The Literature of Subversion, 72–78. 697 Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 4. 184. 1–9. 698 Joanne Wilkes, Lord Byron and Madame de Sta[l, 87–88. 699 Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 4. 181. 9. 700 Ibid. 4. 182. 6.

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Lebens-Wanderschaft, are sombrely inverted into death as nirvana, a final, saving nothingness. Again, illusions of Paradise Regained are, step by step, disillusioned into an inescapable awareness of Paradise forever Lost. Neither can the ocean or the rest of nature yield any epistemologically readable Platonic symbols to the Romantic Disillusionist, in contradistinction to Positive Romanticism – a sceptical view of nature pointing the way to Baudelaire’s and Pater’s subjective reading of the symbols of nature and art in Fin-de-SiHcle Symbolism. In Heine’s collection of poems entitled “Die Nordsee” (1825–1826), a foolish young man asks existential questions on the ocean shore and finds no answer, confronted with nature’s aloofness and indifference: Es murmeln die Wogen ihr ewges Gemurmel, Es wehet der Wind, es fliehen die Wolken, Es blinken die Sterne, gleichgültig und kalt, Und ein Narr wartet auf Antwort.701

And in Heine’s poem “Childe Harold” (MS 1827), which imagines the shipping of Byron’s body back to England and was set to music by Franz Schubert, the ocean carries the bark with the poet’s coffin, death meeting death. Nature’s sympathy with human suffering, the mourning of the waves, and the lament of a sick water nymph are mere poetic fantasies. The muteness of the bleak scene – anticipating the cathedral scene in James Thomson B.V.’s City of Dreadful Night (1874) – underscores the impression of man’s Geworfenheit in the universe, alone on the wide, wide sea. Heine was quite aware of Byron’s sea imagery and appropriated it in his own writings:702 Eine starke, schwarze Barke Segelt trauervoll dahin. Die vermummten und verstummten Leichenhüter sitzen drin. Toter Dichter, stille liegt er, Mit entblößtem Angesicht; Seine blauen Augen schauen Immer noch zum Himmelslicht. Aus der Tiefe klingts, als riefe Eine kranke Nixenbraut, Und die Wellen, sie zerschellen An dem Kahn, wie Klagelaut.703 701 Heine, Die Nordsee, Fragen, lines 15–18, in: Sämtliche Schriften, I. 208. 702 Howard Isham, Image of the Sea: Oceanic Consciousness in the Romantic Century, New York NY 2004, 132–133. 703 Heine, Romanzen, Childe Harold, in: Sämtliche Schriften, IV. 375.

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Byron’s numerous representations of and references to the all-destructive and all-indifferent ocean (and to Napoleon’s love of it) may also have inspired a scene in Grabbe’s historical drama Napoleon oder Die hundert Tage (1831) where Napoleon decides to leave Elba to resume his throne. Born on Corsica, exiled on Elba, and (as the spectators knew) destined to die on St Helena, Napoleon’s enamoured fascination with the ocean assumes the quality of bitter dramatic irony. He addressed the ocean as Amphitrite, his love, believing he could direct it at will, soothing or stirring as desired. His self-reliance is doubly ironic because Amphitrite, wife of Poseidon, has a name denoting destruction, “wearing away the shore on all sides”. Thus, Amphitrite is Napoleon’s deceptive femme fatale: Amphitrite, gewaltige, blauäugige Jungfrau – schon lange läßt du mich umsonst um dich buhlen – ich soll dir schmeicheln […] aber ich weiß, du liebst ihn noch, den Sohn der Revolution – einst vergaßest du deine Launen und trugst ihn mit sicheren Armen von den Pyramiden nach dem kleinen Glockenturm von Fr8jus – morgen trägst du mich von Elba noch einmal dahin. Amphitrite, schlummre süß.704

In the same year of 1831, Grillparzer staged his formally classical, but ideologically subversive, tragedy Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen (1831), a disillusionist version of the Greek story of Hero and Leander, in Vienna’s Burgtheater. Hero’s illusion of living a life of Apollonian tranquility as a chaste priestess of the chaste Aphrodite Uranos is soon discredited. Her aristocratic pride as a member of the priest caste stands in blatant contradiction to her fleeing the tyranny of the male members of her family. Her cult of Amor and Hymen adumbrates her encounter with Leander and subsequent falling in love with him. Love will have its way. The priests and temple guards stand for the repressive ancien r8gime that she both loves with her aristocratic pride and with her disdain of the multitude and hates for its anachronistic facets and privileges, much like Lord Byron. The lamp of hope that Hero places in the window of her proud tower to lead Leander when he swims the Hellespont (a feat imitated by Byron) proves a fatal will-o’-the-wisp when the priest removes it and Leander is drowned. The splendid Apollonian temple is located close to the dark Dionysian sea, which swallows Leander and washes him on shore like driftwood. As in real politics after the Congress of Vienna, the ancien r8gime has reaffirmed its death-dealing power of killing true lovers, victims of social hierarchies and religious taboos. Lovers can be united only in death, though tradition would not even allow them a common grave: “Zwei Leichen und ein Grab. O gönnt es ihnen!”705 Amor, whom Hero served as his mother’s priestess, has not kept his promise of salvation by love. The tragedy ends on a note of reproach to priestly imposture in mere semblances of holy 704 Grabbe, Napoleon oder Die hundert Tage, 1831, I/4, in: Werke, ed. H.-G. Werner, Berlin 1987, II. 155. 705 Grillparzer, Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen, 1831, act V, in: Werke, ed. cit. I. 610.

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purity and, worse, bitter stigmatization of god’s and nature’s indifference. Ianthe’s concluding address to the statue of Amor is the perverted prayer of a nun who leaves the temple of Aphrodite (or the church of Christ) in bitter disappointment: “Versprichst du viel, und hälst du so dein Wort?”706 In Romantic Disillusionism, nature is indifferent, even hostile, to man on his life’s pilgrimage. The deaths of thousands of creatures – human or non-human, high or low, good or evil, guilty or innocent – occur indiscriminately, in the same ocean and under the same sun, while the same processes of nature and the same ways of life continue as ever. There is no Wordsworthian or Emersonian harmony, ring of sympathy, marriage, or joy or mourning of nature with man’s fate. In the later dramas of Georg Büchner, the poetry of Heinrich Heine, the prose of Giacomo Leopardi, the translations of Edward Fitzgerald, the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, and the novels of Thomas Hardy, this subversive dissociation, nature’s cold apathy or blind will, finds various expressions in connection with man’s aimlessness. In Leopardi’s dialogue between Nature and an Icelander, for instance, the Icelander learns that the life of this universe is confined in a constant, joyless circle of creation and destruction, destroying and being destroyed, Nietzsche’s “die ewige Wiederkehr des Gleichen”: “Die ewige Sanduhr des Daseins wird immer wieder umgedreht – und du mit ihr, Stäubchen vom Staube!”707 Leopardi’s Dame Nature mocks the Icelander’s presumptuous search for a joyful, quiet, happy private life by trying to escape her. Seeking refuge in a hot, undiscovered country, the exact opposite of his icy, barren homeland, he has still encountered her, much as Vasco da Gama had passed the Cape of Good Hope only to find a new world no better than the one he had expected to leave. Creation (Nature) takes no special interest in man, and would not care if it accidentally occurred to her to extinguish the whole human race: Immaginavi tu forse che il mondo fosse fatto per causa vostra? Ora sappi che nelle fatture, negli ordini e nelle operazioni mie, trattone pochissime, sempre ebbi ed ho l’intenzione a tutt’altro, che alla felicit/ degli uomini o all’infelicit/. Quando io vi offendo in qualunque modo e con qual si sia mezzo, io non me n’avveggo, se non rarissime volte; come, ordinariamente, se io vi diletto o vi benefico, io non lo so; e non ho fatto, come credete voi, quelle tali cose, o non fo quelle tali azioni, per dilettarvi o giovarvi. E finalmente, se anche mi avvenisse di estinguere tutta la vostra specie, io non me ne avvedrei.708

706 Ibid. 707 Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, Aph. 341. Cf. Also sprach Zarathustra, 1883–5, III, VI. I. 270–73. 708 Leopardi, Dialogo della Natura e di un Islandese, Operette morali, 1824, in: Tutte le opere, I. 116.

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Instead of mutual sympathy nature’s special care for mankind and mankind’s inborn orientation to commune with nature in this world and the Emersonian oversoul (or Hindu paramatman) in the world beyond, Büchner’s Lucile and Hardy’s Tess also experience nature’s cold indifference. Their suffering and deaths are pointless, unnoticed, aimless eradications from a disorientated pilgrimage of life, providing neither divine salvation nor natural compassion. The only advancement in knowledge that they supply is blank disillusion. Büchner’s Lucile, choosing suicide by self-denunciation in consequence of the death of her beloved Camille Desmoulins, makes that very experience: Es darf ja alles leben, alles, die kleine Mücke da, der Vogel. Warum denn er [Camille] nicht? Der Strom des Lebens müßte stocken, wenn nur der eine Tropfen verschüttet würde. Die Erde müßte eine Wunde bekommen von dem Streich. Es regt sich alles, die Uhren gehen, die Glocken schlagen, die Leute laufen, das Wasser rinnt, und alles so weiter […] Das hilft nichts, da ist noch alles wie sonst: die Häuser, die Gasse, der Wind geht, die Wolken ziehen. – Wir müssens wohl leiden.709

Like the wanderings of his Childe Harold, the career of Byron’s Don Juan is also an inverted pilgrimage, not, as in Bunyan, from destruction to Paradise, but from illusions of Paradise to awareness and experience of only havoc and ruin. Plodding their way from thorns to ashes, both heroes fade away into destruction’s mass.710 The winds of fate blow Don Juan to and fro at will until death finally swallows him up. His efforts to regulate the course of his life invariably fail. When he is in love with Alfonso’s wife Julia, against the laws of marriage, he tries to platonize his feelings by stylizing her into a Wordsworthian or Coleridgean princesse lointaine. However, his attempts at spiritual elevation inevitably regress to nature’s simplistic, and very carnal, hunger. “He did the best he could With things not very subject to control […]”711 Byron’s satire on Wordworth’s and Coleridge’s Positive Romanticism712 culminates in a stanza describing Juan’s relapse from cosmic philosophy and Platonic dreams of the ideal to carnal awareness of physical realities: He thought about himself, and the whole earth, Of man the wonderful, and of the stars, And how the deuce they ever could have birth; And then he thought of earthquakes, and of wars, How many miles the moon might have in girth, Of air balloons and of the many bars

709 710 711 712

Büchner, Dantons Tod, act IV, 76. Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 4. 164. 9. Byron, Don Juan, 1. 91. 6–7. Ibid. 1. 90–91.

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To perfect knowledge of the boundless skies; And then he thought of Donna Julia’s eyes.713

What we falsely idealize as love and metaphysical cognition through love is nothing but nature’s priapic urge – a view that the novels of the Marquis de Sade take to an extreme, as in the villain Dalville philosophically haranguing his pious victim Sophie, alias Justine. Virtue is nothing but the unnatural justification of the weak and impotent. Julia’s attempts at Roman Catholic chastity fail along with Juan’s attempts at Platonic philosophy. The “pure Platonic squeeze” she gives his hand only serves to increase irrepressible desire, and their initially pious conversation ends where destiny will have it end, in adultery : A little still she strove, and much repented, And whispering ‘I will ne’er consent’, – consented.714

The narrator’s satirical stanza on the folly and danger of Plato and Platonism constitutes an attack on Positive Romanticism that is even more vitriolic than his satirical stanzas on Wordsworth and Colerige. By a deconstructive enumeration and inversion of the values traditionally attributed to him, Plato is charged with all the corresponding vices: pimping, fraud, boredom and sheer stupidity for not having understood “the controlless core Of human hearts”: Oh Plato! Plato! you have paved the way, With your confounded fantasies, to more Immoral conduct by the fancied sway Your system feigns o’er the controlless core Of human hearts, than all the long array Of poets, and romancers: – You’re a bore, A charlatan, a coxcomb, – and have been, At best, no better than a go-between.715

Don Juan resumes the satirical anti-Platonism advanced in Byron’s earlier comic epic, Beppo (1818). Beppo’s sexually promiscuous wife Laura is the very contrary of her name giver, Petrarch’s ideal Laura, just as the Venetian “carnival” is the time at which the flesh is most feasted. Sexual self-restraint and marital fidelity appear as a mere hypocritical masquerade, in England more so than in Italy. The narrator frankly admits that he prefers a real, attractive woman to the ideal but unattainable women of Raphael and Antonio Canova. “Eve of the land which still is Paradise!”,716 with its reference to the mother of sin, is highly ambiguous and is 713 714 715 716

Ibid. 1. 92. 1–8. Ibid. 1. 117. 7–8. Ibid. 1. 116. 1–8. Byron, Beppo, 46. 1. See also Drummond Bone, Childe Harold IV, Don Juan and Beppo, in: Drummond Bone (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Byron, Cambridge 2004, 164–165.

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later echoed in Don Juan in connection with Haid8e’s real sexual attractions in a seeming paradise: I’ve seen much finer women, ripe and real, Than all the nonsense of their stone ideal.717

The narrator’s numerous meta-narrative reflections on his own art of epic writing confirm his anti-Platonism, parading his natural weakness of will and mind in his lack of artistic control. He knows the rules of epic writing; he quotes them, acknowledges them, and promises to observe them. But all his assurances to write a regular epic in the style of Virgil and Homer with strict regard to Aristotle’s rules718 are broken as soon as made. This is most apparent in the case of his comic meta-narrative digressions which are, with frequent irony, initiated by a solemn resolution not to lapse into that universally stigmatized vitium epicum: The regularity of my design Forbids all wandering as the worst of sinning, And therefore I shall open with a line (Although it cost me half an hour in spinning) Narrating somewhat of Don Juan’s father, And also of his mother, if you’d rather.719

Byron had already tried this technique of digression and its Shandyesque rationale in Beppo. In a metaphysically homeless world ruled by chance and the Goddess Fortune instead of Divine Providence, the poet can no more plan his work than Napoleon could plan his victory. His pen rules him as it pleases to digress: To turn, – and to return; – the devil take it! This story slips for ever through my fingers, Because, just as the stanza likes to make it, It needs must be […]720

The hypocritical adoption of the rule of moral decorum and instruction is broken in the same ironic way. In Don Juan, this most “indecent” of epics, the speaker denounces all amorous writing, vowing to tack a moral to each error and

717 Byron, Don Juan, 2. 118. 7–8. 718 Ibid. 1. 200. 7 and 1. 201. 2. 719 Ibid. 1. 7. 3–8. For an extensive analysis of Byron’s epic devices and their several functions see B. Wilkie, Romantic Poets and Epic Tradition, Byron and the Epic of Negation, Madison WI 1965, 188–226. 720 Byron, Beppo, 63. 1–4. For Napoleon’s fall and Byron’s fatalism under the ruling power of Fortune see the two preceding stanzas.

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attack all passions in turn, only to continue his most unconservative and prurient narration of illicit love affairs in both Pulcian comic epics: Now, if my Pegasus should not be shod ill, This poem will become a moral model.721

The narrator’s device of laying the blame on Pegasus refers to Tristram Shandy’s comments on his bolting and uncontrollable literary hobby-horse, and on his comparable breaking of rules: […] I can no more help it than my destiny : – A sudden impulse comes across me – drop the curtain, Shandy – I drop it – Strike a line here across the paper, Tristram – I strike it – and hey for a new chapter!722

The difference, however, is that Sterne doubted the validity of and intended to undermine the Neoclassical rules, without doubting the order and aim of creation, and ridiculed the assumption of a fatalism that excused man’s actions as unavoidable. The ill-fated begetting of Tristram by his father’s asking of the wrong question in the decisive moment is just as broad a satire as it being Tristram’s pen that ran riot to write the novel instead of a planning author. By contrast, Byron’s denial of valid universal rules, possible control of the human passions, and personal guilt was fundamental and existential. It was an article in the subversive creed of Romantic Disillusionism which Schopenhauer elaborated on philosophically in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1819–1844). To him the Romantic and Platonic love of an individual for an individual is a pious self-deceit by which man beautifies the blind and vulgar workings of the Will – the genius of the species – through individual man. It is the mere sexual impulse for the preservation of the species that has no connection with any independent intellect or reason. “Es ist ein eitles und lächerliches Vorgeben, wenn Weiber behaupten, in den Geist eines Mannes sich verliebt zu haben […]”723 What we call love, is, in reality, nothing but “Befriedigung des Geschlechtstriebes” hidden underneath “übersinnlichen Seifenblasen”.724 Thus, in mythology, )vqod_tg P\mdglor is natural strength (“Gier und Heftigkeit”) and )vqod_tg Oqqam_a is natural weakness, both being extremes of the scale of the innate, irresistible 721 Byron, Don Juan, 5. 2. 7–8; note the self-deconstructive pararhyme, and cf. ibid. 12. 39. 1–8. Also note the irony in Byron’s Letter to John Murray, his publisher, dated Venice, 1 February 1819, in: Letters and Journals, VI. 99: “I maintain that it [Don Juan] is the most moral of poems – but if people won’t discover the moral, that is their fault, not mine.” All subsequent quotations from Byron’s letters, journals, and detached thoughts are from this edition, unless otherwise indicated. 722 Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 1760–1767, volume IV, chapter 10. 723 Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, II. 723. 724 Ibid. 710.

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sexual drive.725 Plato’s philosophy of love is inverted and discredited insofar as the species works through the individual, seeking its general preservation through coming generations. Schopenhauer’s Will acts upon matter just as violently as Plato’s idea, enforcing its manifestation in the individual, though not in the sense of being a dialectical and spiralling reintegration, but rather a circular continuation in perpetual absurdity, descending from one generation to another : Was nun aber zuletzt zwei Individuen verschiedenen Geschlechts mit solcher Gewalt ausschließlich zueinander zieht, ist der in der ganzen Gattung sich darstellende Wille zum Leben, der hier eine seinen Zwecken entsprechende Objektivation seines Wesens anticipirt in dem Individo, welches jene Beiden zeugen können.726

As long as Rahel, Grillparzer’s beautiful and seductive Jewess of Toledo, is alive she commands her Christian king’s passion which has primacy over all his formerly taught wisdom and education. Her imputed witchcraft is nothing more than the Schopenhauerian sex drive that she shares with the king, the curse of the human species irrespective of race, religion, and gender. As soon as she is murdered and the king sees her mangled body he regains his superimposed wisdom simply because his compulsive sex drive is quelled. His pardoning words addressed to his friend Garceran, an accomplice in the murder committed by the grandes to cure him of his aberration, confess his astonishment at his sudden return to what he misnames virtue and duty : Statt üppger Bilder der Vergangenheit Trat Weib und Kind und Volk mir vor die Augen. Zugleich schien sich ihr Antlitz zu verzerren, Die Arme sich zu regen mich zu fassen. Da warf ich ihr ihr Bild nach in die Gruft Und bin nun hier und schaudre, wie du siehst.727

Byronic and Schopenhauerian man has neither any strength of individual will nor any control over his instincts and passions to overcome the Will to live – to follow Buddha’s wisdom and release the rungs of the wheel of life. Such is Mazeppa’s prototypical example of a dying man regretting his lost chances, which he never really had nor ever would have, remaining reluctant to give up his vain hopes: The wretch still hopes his woes must end, And Death, whom he should deem his friend, Appears, to his distemper’d eyes, 725 Ibid. 711–712. 726 Ibid. 711. 727 Grillparzer, Die Jüdin von Toledo, 1872, V, in: Dramen, ed. cit. I. 869.

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Arrived to rob him of his prize, The tree of his new Paradise. To-morrow would have given him all, Repaid his pangs, repair’d his fall; To-morrow would have been the first Of days no more deplored or curst, But bright, and long, and beckoning years, Seen dazzling through the mist of tears, Guerdon of many a painful hour; To-morrow would have given him power To rule, to shine, to smite, to save – And must it dawn upon his grave?728

728 Byron, Mazeppa, 1819, lines 748–762. Nor can Mazeppa himself, when telling his story in the year of his death and in a situation of total defeat, give up his vain hope “To rule, to shine, to smite, to save”. His concluding exhortation “Let none despond, let none despair!” (line 854) is an instance of tragic irony.

III

The Vanity of the Passions

1)

The Vanity of Love

Love and war were the great themes of ancient epic poetry, which served as a model for the formation of the medieval chivalrous code. And, in the medieval and Renaissance romance whose revival gave “Romanticism” its name, love and war recurred as two complementary passions.729 To be courteous and faithful in love as well as valorous and faithful in war, “preux et courtois”, were the traditional chief virtues of medieval chivalry and early modern aristocracy. Moreover, the Classical Tradition, including Christianity, understood war to be a necessary purge for the body politic’s diseases of effeminacy and sloth, just as it saw mental conflict as a necessary purge of the mind from error ; but love would heal the wounds and restore peace as well as order : “Omnia vincit amor, et nos cedamus amori”.730 In the well ordered and religiously semanticized world of romance, love was the reward for the virtuous and victorious soldier on his return from danger and war, as in Homer’s Odyssey and Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, works well-known to their sceptical reader Byron. And in the Petrarchan sonnet tradition, love even commanded cosmic participation, with nature sympathetically responding to the lovers’ physical beauty, states of the soul, and fate. In Kleist’s tale “Die Verlobung in St. Domingo” (1810) discussed above, however, the true love between Gustav and Toni fails to brave the adversities of war in a cosmos completely indifferent to the lovers. The negro slave revolt on Haiti, like the French Revolution, has only inverted ancien r8gime tyranny ; the consequences are murder and war. Gustav misunderstands Toni’s strategy to save him by seemingly taking him prisoner for her vengeful father. The tender lover turns to a vindictive hater ; he shoots Toni, then shoots himself on seeing his mistake. Both Gustav’s act of love and act of murder are prompted by passion 729 Labbe, The Romantic Paradox, 11–38. 730 Virgil, Bucolica, X. 69.

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and happen on the spur of the moment, in a state of absence of mind, “im Taumel wunderbar verwirrter Sinne”.731 All action takes place in extremes, excluding any possibility of balance, autonomy of will, or personal guilt. Split human nature gives the lie to Virgil, the Bible, and Christian theodicy. “Noble savagery” is discredited, as it is later in Pushkin’s verse tale The Gypsies (1827). Aleko, Pushkin’s Byronic hero, seeks release from his dark, uncontrollable passions in an escape to a gypsy camp and free love with the gypsy woman Zemfira, anticipating the restoration of his virtue and happiness in line with the Positive Romantic doctrine of cultural and chronological primitivism. But when he surprises Zemfira who has taken another lover, he kills them both in an act of blind revenge. Love and war appear as two sides of the same coin; the heterogeneous nature of man. Zemfira’s old father and the narrator conclude the poem by contradicting Rousseau and all Positive Romanticism: life is endless, circular repetition, irresistible passions are found everywhere, and there is no escape from fate. In Byron’s and Pushkin’s wake, Lermontov created his eponymous Demon, a destroyer who seeks redemption in love and, instead, works nothing but havoc both on his beloved Tamara and himself: l’amour fatal instead of amor vincit omnia. The demon lover kills Tamara with his kiss while the night watchman turns his senseless rounds, neither heeding the victim’s moans nor calling the hours. Relapsed into his former ennui or Weltekel, with its concomitant hatred and vice, his wheel comes full circle; the Demon survives to become far more unhappy than before his short-lived illusion of terrestrial virtue and bliss. Absurd circles, fatal love, atavism, and love turning into hatred are also central themes of the plays of Grillparzer. At the end of his Golden Fleece trilogy (1821), the Colchian amazon Medea relapses into her original barbarity when her Greek husband Jason turns away from her, her Greek cultivation in Corinth notwithstanding, burning Corinth’s palace and murdering her rival Kreusa and all her children: “Medea bin ich wieder, Dank euch Götter!”732 Her well-learned, regular pentameters cede to her original chaotic lines, not to a noble savage’s natural rhythms that Percy Shelley called on poets to revert to in his Defence of Poetry (MS 1821). The fourth act concludes with a shocking tableau vivant: the loving wife and mother stands erect and threatening, like a warlike amazon, holding the blood-dripping dagger with which she murdered her two boys aloft. The most shocking treatment of extremes of love and hatred however, at least to Victorian eyes, was provided by Emily Bront[’s Wuthering Heights (1847). Heathcliff ’s neopagan love of Catherine turns to hatred and a desire for revenge due to a Kleistian misunderstanding; the elementary and irresistible force of 731 Kleist, Die Verlobung in St. Domingo, 1810, in: Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, III. 146. 732 Grillparzer, Das Goldene Vlies, part III Medea, IV, in: Werke, I. 337.

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Heathcliff ’s passion rages until it becomes spent in his death by starvation and burial beside Catherine, with the side planks of the two coffins removed to exclude the body of Catherine’s conventional, tame husband Edgar Linton. Both love and hate lead to death in a dark tale that teems with dead bodies, coffins, and burials, thus forming a link between the Decadence of Edgar Allan Poe and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The narrow Christian world view of the novel’s second narrator, Nelly Dean, proves to be incapable of grasping an amoral universe subject to contingency and inhabited by illogically constructed men. To see no purposeful connection between love and war, but to understand the forces as simple, instinctive drives and symptoms of the antithetically mixed nature of man was to discredit established Christian anthropology. This was the case in Byron’s Don Juan, whose protagonist is irresistibly impelled by illogically split passions, and in Bulwer-Lytton’s Rienzi, whose antagonist Montreal’s natural fate is to lead a totally incongruent, contradictory “life of love and war”.733 In both cases the ungovernable passions of love and war are self-destructive. Moreover, to deconstruct love and war as vain by denying their paths to immortality was to discredit and demoralize the restoration of the old feudal order in Europe, denying its legitimacy and undermining both its sexual and military politics. But its final consequence was as self-deconstructive to the poet, who had to admit the vanity of his own literary efforts. Byron discredited romance, with its teleologically planned and religiously semanticized universe, by either falsifying it into melodrama in his Oriental Tales and the original manuscript version of Manfred (1816) or subverting it in Beppo (1818) and Don Juan (1819–1824). Letitia Elizabeth Landon and many other Romantic Disillusionists followed him.734 Byron rejected “the melodrama’s simple, absolute binaries of good and evil” and its conservative dumping of rebellion in final domesticity – as in Alfred Bunn’s 1834 melodramatization of Manfred for its Covent Garden production.735 Melodrama showed the conversion of hatred to love, and thus fostered dreams of the possibility of a lasting peace consequent to war, as after the Treaty of Amiens in 1802 and the Congress of Vienna in 1814–1815. Byron would have turned in his grave seeing his Gothic, post-Waterloo play thus purged from the theme of irreparable guilt and deprived of its Prometheanism and Pyrrhonism for its first stage performance. We have already seen that doubt of the doctrine of the redeeming power of love in Grillparzer’s very Byronic tragedy Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen (1831), with its concomitant exposition of man’s weak will and mind. It reads like a refutation of the mystical ending of Goethe’s Faust (1832), where the princesse lointaine, 733 Bulwer-Lytton, Rienzi, book III, chapter 2, in: Novels and Tales, II. 113–125. 734 Labbe, The Romantic Paradox, 135–174. 735 Jeffrey N. Cox, Romanticism in the Shadow of War, Cambridge 2014, 59–92.

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“das Ewig-Weibliche”, reunites fallen and sinful man with his spiritual home in a religious ascension. And, on a less metaphysical level, it discredits the redeeming benefits of the hero’s or heroine’s right choice of love in the novel of the Romantic Period. Often placed between two lovers, the enamoured protagonist must choose between a romantic partner on the one hand and a conventional one on the other, in a romantic or an anti-romantic triangle.736 Thus, Walter Scott’s Waverley and Ivanhoe go through a development per aspera ad astra, in which they learn to prefer the mild, conventional, light-haired woman (Rose Bradwardine, Rowena) to the wild, dark, romantic, and seductive one (Flora MacIvor, Rebecca), thus working to their own and their country’s good in a happy ending. In Valperga (1823), Mary Shelley subverted this theme of the saving, right choice in a moral universe. Thus, in a historical novel in Scott’s succession, the Classical Tradition motif of the Choice of Hercules as adopted by Christianity is challenged in a Romantic Disillusionist (rather than feminist) version of Scott. Placed between two women – the mild, white, forgiving Euthanasia on the one hand and the wild, dark, undisciplined Beatrice on the other – Castruccio experiences both women contributing to his downfall and death as he contributes to theirs. Fatal love replaces redemptive love, as oblivion replaces glory. Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1765) and Mysterious Mother (1768), with their Dark Romantic view of the consequences of love and the working of dark incestuous passions, threw a long shadow. In Mary Shelley’s second work of fiction after Frankenstein, Matilda (MS 1819–1820), a novella unpublished during her lifetime for its shocking motif of a father’s unconquerable passion for his own daughter as typical of the Romantic Disillusionist fascination with the chaotic unconscious, all love – sexual or other – is destructive: the love of Matilda’s father for his wife Diana; his love for his orphan daughter ; his daughter’s love for him; and the love of Matilda’s friend Woodville for his wife Elinor. The soteriological, biblical image of the bitter cup is used for purposes of anti-biblical scepticism: Is it not strange that grief should quickly follow so divine a happiness? I drank of an enchanted cup but gall was at the bottom of its long drawn sweetness. […] I had no idea that misery could arise from love, and this lesson that all must learn was taught me […]737

In some of her short stories that were contributed to annuals such as The Keepsake, Mary Shelley at first sight seems to adopt the Christian doctrine of the redeeming power of love – happy endings were expected in such popular literary gift-books. But, on closer inspection, the tales subvert this doctrine. “The 736 Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, Oxford 1975, passim. 737 Mary Shelley, Matilda, MS 1819–1820, in: Novels and Selected Works, II. 17.

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Dream” (1831), for instance, reads like a parody of a Roman Catholic saint’s legend, with a not-so-very-constant heroine of the name Constance looking for spiritual guidance sleeping on an invented St Catherine’s couch high on a perilous, protruding ledge behind the Gothic St Catherine’s chapel, yet being full of sexual yearning for her lover Gaspar, the possible murderer of her father and brothers in the French Civil Wars. The dream that unites her with her daring lover partakes more of psychoanalysis than of religious revelation, and the parodically described marriage ceremony in the chapter (as seen through the eyes of a half-dreaming servant girl) contributes nothing to a peaceful settlement between Roman Catholics and Protestants in France. The aforementioned tale “Transformation” (1831) features a highly unreliable, pre-Poesque first-person narrator, Guido, whose love for Juliet, combined with his excesses of aggression and hatred, take him to the brink of destruction. The happiness of the tale’s ending leaves the reader doubtful of its stability because Guido’s faults of character, his pride and narcistic self-love, remain unreformed and the devil’s curse is on him and his Juliet. Worse, readers are even given strong hints to doubt Guido’s sanity and suspect that the devil episode might be a madman’s fancy, a combination of wishful thinking and psychological projections as in many of Poe’s tales. In Byron’s as well as Mary Shelley’s Negative Romantic anthropology, the attainment of lasting happiness and eternal love and glory are the two major illusory aims towards which man is driven by his passions. With the grudge she bore Byron, Lady Caroline Lamb represented this Byronism in Glenarvon (1816). Lord Glenarvon (Byron) here appears as a fallen angel and spoiler whose obsessive love destroys Calantha (Lamb). But Glenarvon is aware his love is not only destructive but self-destructive – a consuming flame for both – and that there is no perspective of a future behind their deaths. She finally dies distracted and in love, he dies shortly later distracted and at war. Calantha’s repeated promises to break off the adulterous, dangerous love affair fail and Glenarvon, whose love is equally ungovernable, knows that conventionally taught obedience, repentance, and reform are both impossible and vain: ‘Tell both priests and parents,’ he said exultingly, ‘that one kiss from the lips of those we love, is dearer than every future hope.’ All day – every hour in the day, – every instant of passing time Glenarvon thought but of Calantha. It was not love, it was distraction. When near him, she felt ecstacy […]738

It is against their better rational insight that the “infatuated” lovers must play “upon the edge of the precipice”, and “fall”, or rather fling themselves into the gulf. Throughout the novel this dense imagery of unavoidable self-destruction is 738 Caroline Lamb, Glenarvon, ed. cit. 202.

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combined with thoughts about “fate” and “guilt”. The reader is made to realize that where l’amour fatal is “fate” or “destiny”, guilt may be a feeling inculcated by convention and religion, but not an ethical or forensic category of judgment. Guilt tortures both Glenarvon, for deserting his love Calantha Avondale, and Calantha, for deserting her husband Lord Avondale. Glenarvon’s death in torture and horror follows Gothic novel conventions of the archetypal death of the Gothic villain – though with the narrator’s repeated comments on the injustice and inconsistency of the world: O man, how weak and impotent is thy nature! […] Thou can’st command thousands, and govern enemies; but thou can’st not rule thy stormy passions, nor alter the destiny that leads thee on.739

Even if man’s reason could master his fatuous passions, their objects would be vain. In the tradition of ancient and modern sceptical philosophy, things have neither value nor duration that can justify efforts towards their possession. Love and beauty wither with age; glory dies on the battlefield (or even less heroically), or fades to oblivion in the dust of libraries; empires collapse; truth eludes us as soon as we believe we have comprehension of it. Here, sceptical philosophy coincided with Byron’s own life experience: his search for truth, his love affairs, his engagement in war, and the most unheroic disease behind the battle-lines which led to his unheroic death. With Byron, the vanity of love and glory became a central theme in Romantic Disillusionism, for instance in Espronceda’s poem “A Jarife en una org&a” (1840). Just as in Byron and Leopardi disillusion necessarily follows illusion and “disinganno” follows “inganno”, so, in Espronceda, “desengaÇo” necessarily follows “engaÇo”. The poem’s feverish speaker, split between passion and reason, longs for excesses of love although he suspects that he is simply following a dangerous will-o’-the-wisp, an illusion of divine aims in a godless world. Yo quiero amor, quiero gloria, Quiero un deleite divino, Como en mi mente imagino, Como en el mundo no hay ; Y es la luz de aquel lucero Que engaÇj mi fantas&a, Fuego fatuo, falso gu&a Que errante y ciego me tray.740

Byron, Espronceda’s acknowledged model, had formulated the vanity of love and glory even in his early verse and prose, a fact which attests that this sub739 Ibid. 312. 740 Espronceda, A Jarifa en una org&a, lines 33–40, I. 116.

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versive view was a traditional, sceptical hallmark as well as biographical experience. In his satirical poem The Waltz (1813), Byron poured ridicule on the cult of love and glory in that new dance, imported from the principalities of the former Roman-German Empire, a stronghold of feudal tradition and the restoration of the old order in Europe. Two years later, the Congress of Vienna was to make the waltz famous: “Der Kongress tanzt”.741 The fashion, with its political symbolism, spread across England and young officers, keen for love and glory, would dance the seductive waltz with their spurs on. Byron’s mock-heroic invocation is to Terpsichore, the unchaste and promiscuous Muse of dancing, “The least a vestal of the virgin Nine”:742 Hail, nimble nymph! to whom the young hussar, The whisker’d votary of waltz and war, His night devotes, despite of spur and boots; A sight unmatch’d since Orpheus and his brutes.743

Byron sarcastically concentrated on scenes of foppery, promiscuity, adultery, separation, cuckoldry, and barren or thwarted sexuality.744 Such deconstruction of “amor vincit omnia” was quite contrary to the Platonic celebration of love in Positive Romanticism. Whether chaste and marital in Wordsworth and Coleridge or free and erotic in Blake and Percy Shelley, love was the force that reunited both the fragmented parts of this world and the material world with the spiritual one beyond. In Byron, Heine, Leopardi, Musset, and other Negative Romantics, love is a figment of the brain – a fallacy, a false goddess falsely sanctified in religious rites and sacraments such as marriage. Neither Shelleyan ecstatic love, nor Keatsian perception of beauty, nor Wordsworthian “spots of time” of inspiration bring man closer to or grant him insights into infinity. As we have seen, prophetic or apocalyptic inspiration of Positive Romanticism was now denied, replaced by the assumption of a mere mood or estro, including fits of heretical thought. A satirical print by Charles Williams, entitled “A Noble Poet – Scratching Up his Head” (1823) shows the self-exiled Byron in a room in Venice, with a spaniel as his alter ego, surrounded by such heretical publications as The Liberal, Don Juan, and Cain, waiting for inspiration and getting it from a web-winged, goat-legged devil (Old Scratch) perching on the back of his chair.745 The quest for the unknown, later called “nostalgie de l’8tranger”, is wearying 741 Various formulations attributed to Friedrich Rückert and the Austrian field-marshall Charles Joseph Lamoral, Prince de Ligne. 742 Byron, The Waltz, lines 3 and 6. 743 Ibid. lines 15–8. 744 N. Lennartz, Lord Byron – Britain’s First Anti-Romantic, in: Re-mapping Romanticism, ed. C. Bode – F.-W. Neumann, Essen 2001, 104–105. 745 British Museum Satires 14496.

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because it is always ultimately frustrating. In Alfred de Musset’s semi-autobiographical novel Confession d’un enfant du siHcle (1836), a modern hero’s (Octave’s as well as Musset’s own) idealist expectations collapse, one after another.746 It is Octave’s confidant, the young lawyer Desgenais, who first demolishes his dreams and ideals of love, setting him on a career of materialism, debauchery, and dandyism. Desgenais’s portrait of love is a copy of Byron’s:747 ‘La perfection, ami, n’est pas plus faite pour nous que l’immensit8. Il faut ne la chercher en rien, ne la demander / rien, ni / l’amour, ni / la beaut8, ni au bonheur, ni / la vertu […]’748

A similar career of progressive disillusionment is the fate of the initially idealistic titular hero of Musset’s Romantic historical drama Lorenzaccio (1834). Again and again, and on all levels, ancient myth and beliefs are deconstructed by modern experience. Love, like hatred, will die and better be forgotten together with the mortal objects of our mortal love. And, should love and hatred continue to torment us, they can only be tamed by art, the creative act of form-giving. Thus, in the dialogues between the poet and his muse in Musset’s Nuits, the muse calls upon the poet to speak out his grief in poetry : Si l’effort est trop grand pour la faiblesse humaine De pardonner les maux qui nous viennent d’autrui, Ppargne-toi du moins le tourment de la haine; f d8faut du pardon, laisse venir l’oubli. Les morts dorment en paix dans le sein de la terre Ainsi doivent dormir nos sentiments 8teints. Ces reliques du cœur ont aussi leur poussiHre; Sur leurs restes sacr8s ne portons pas les mains. Pourquoi, dans ce r8cit d’une vive souffrance, Ne veut-tu voir qu’un rÞve et qu’un amour tromp8?749

Musset was the most passionate reader and wholehearted admirer of Byron among early French Byronists. Erotic experiences have made his alter-ego speakers, as well as Byron’s Childe Harold, disillusioned, worn-out pilgrims wandering restlessly from new scene to new scene without an aim or insight into infinity. Neither have love and beauty made the speakers of Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal any more knowledgeable or content: Que tu viennes du ciel ou de l’enfer, qu’importe, O Beaut8! monstre 8norme, effrayant, ing8nu! 746 747 748 749

The novel draws on Musset’s relationship with George Sand. Musset, Confession d’un enfant du siHcle, 1836, part 1, chapter 5, ed. cit. 93–100. Ibid. 94. Musset, La nuit d’octobre, 1837, in: Po8sies complHtes, 325.

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Si ton oeil, ton souris, ton pied, m’ouvrent la porte D’un Infini que j’aime et n’ai jamais connu?750

It is the function of the mixed romantic and satiric styles of Byron’s verse tales, often wrongly blamed for carelessness, to provide a formal counterpart to the characters’ lapses from illusion to reality. In The Siege of Corinth (1816), the experienced, disillusioned, renegade narrator sets the tone for his tale of the past in his introduction where youthful illusions of lasting love, lasting health, and lasting peace among religions and nations (corresponding to the language of romance) yield to experiences of the reality of loss, isolation, wounds, war, chaos, and death (corresponding to the language of parody and satire): We were of all tongues and all creeds; – Some were those who counted beads, Some of mosque, and some of church, And some, or I mis-say, of neither ;751

Even his last verse tale The Island (1823), which deals with the mutiny of the Bounty, is marked by that functional mix of styles. The mutineers’ vision of the happiness of love among noble savages in the South Sea is far from being a manifesto of Positive Romantic primitivism. They, like their leader, Christian, are exhausted from toil, submission, abstention, and warfare. Like all men and women, they experience this world as imperfect and dream of a perfect alternative world lost in the past and regainable in the future – a paradise of equality, freedom, plenty, peace, harmony with nature, perennial summer, and perennial love: Young hearts, which languish’d for some sunny isle, Where summer years and summer women smile.752

But that paradise, which they “yearn’d To see again”,753 is not a Platonic remembrance of their origin in a world beyond, but a mere creation born out of their wishful thinking. They know the bleak reality : the British naval command will pursue them, find them, persecute them in court and destroy their shortlived, unreal bliss, just as the ancien r8gime would destroy the revolutionary dreams of an impending millennium. In the poem’s beautiful concluding stanza, the narrator celebrates the love of Torquil and Neuha in effusive words that manifest his own invincible dreams.754 But that love is described as idyllic, 750 Baudelaire, Les fleurs du mal, Hymne / la beaut8, lines 21–24, in: Œuvres complHtes, 24. 751 Byron, [Lines Associated with] The Siege of Corinth, lines 18–21, in: Complete Poetical Works, III. 356. 752 Byron, The Island, 1. 27–28 (stanza 2). 753 Ibid. 1. 49–50 (stanza 2). 754 Ibid. 4. 401–420 (stanza 15).

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unreal, fantastic, and serves as a foil for the very real tragedy of the mutineers, whom the lonely island cannot save. Torquil, the child of nature from a Scottish island, stands apart from the other mutineers, like Ben Bunting or Jack Skyscrape, in his very name. The stanzas that extol these low characters and their activities are Popean mock-heroic bathos, serving the function of discrediting the primitivist dream of Paradise Regained. Torquil shares neither their vulgarity nor their pangs of conscience, and his beloved Neuha, the child of nature from a South Sea island, is reminiscent of Egeria, the imagined nymph in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Christian gazes upon these unreal lovers in “hopeless visions” of better days, with their false promises and scriptural myths, “When all’s gone – to the rainbow’s latest ray”.755 Moreover, the speaker’s comment on the love of Torquil and Neuha stresses their unearthliness, the ecstatic and religious forgetfulness of their bodily limitations, their lack of awareness of “time’s lesson” and “man’s baseness”, and he insinuates danger in calling their love an “allabsorbing flame”, comparing it to a “pure, yet funeral pile”.756 The subterranean cave in which they take refuge teems with imagery of death and amour fatal. Unless they are ghosts or fantasies, they will meet a similar fate as Byron’s Juan and Haid8e, as well as Caroline Lamb’s Glenarvon and Calantha. Juan’s experience with Haid8e recalls Leopardi’s experience with Terese Fattorini, who died of consumption. Leopardi’s famous poem “A Silvia” (MS 1828) expresses the speaker’s and poet’s despair at nature’s sadistic will-o’-thewisps, cruel deception (“inganno”), and betrayal of her votaries: O natura, natura, Perch8 non rendi poi Quel che prometti allor? perch8 di tanto Inganni i figli tuoi?757

Byron’s view of deceitful and painful love profoundly influenced the confessional poetry of August von Platen, who made his disillusionment with his homoerotic love affairs the central theme of his poetry. Discrediting Anteros, the Greek god of returned love and avenger of unreturned love, together with his brother Eros, the Greek god of love, completion, paradise regained, and philosophical cognition, Platen argued the Classical Tradition of Pyrrhonism against that of Platonism, Dark Romanticism against the Enlightenment. As in Byron, human life is the absurd drama of baffled hope. In love, the split, illogical nature of man strives for a happiness that he knows to be the source of his misery or even destruction. Unable to fulfil his love man is unhappy, but love fulfilled leaves him equally unhappy because it is forever fleeting, and even fatal. Platen’s 755 Ibid. 3. 206–207. 756 Ibid. 2. 370–397 (stanza 16). 757 Leopardi, A Silvia, lines 36–39, in: Tutte le opere, I. 26.

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hexameters, chiselled into strict Grecian form, are meant to impose an artistic order upon chaos, though the poet was convinced that art is not eternal and will ultimately be overgrown by chaos, as will civilization by nature. Tulips and roses growing on bogs and rotten pools are deceptive and ephemeral promises without a chance of survival, let alone redemption: Daß ich doch hoffen muß und meiner Wünsche gedenken, Ach, daß die Liebe so quält, ach, daß die Liebe beglückt! Haben wir deinen Besitz, du freundlicher Knabe, verloren, O so ist’s dein Besitz, den wir beständig erflehn; Haben wir deinen Besitz, du tückischer Knabe, gewonnen, O so ist’s dein Besitz, den wir verfluchend verschmähn.758

Platen’s most famous poem, “Tristan” (1825) – Thomas Mann’s favourite lyric of decadent pessimism – evokes the old theme and motif of fatal love, together with the classical myths of Narcissus and Medusa. The very sight of beauty proves lethal for a sensitive man, inflicting an incurable wound and everlasting pain, making him at once long for death yet also shrink back from it over doubts about a redeeming world beyond, as envisaged by the Platonic concept of love: Wer die Schönheit angeschaut mit Augen, Ist dem Tode schon anheimgegeben, Wird für keinen Dienst der Erden taugen, Und doch wird er vor dem Tode beben, Wer die Schönheit angeschaut mit Augen!759

Equally, Franz Grillparzer found doubt of the Platonic concept of saving and reintegrative love in classical antiquity in both Sappho’s fatal love for Phaon and Medea’s fatal love for Jason. Byron, who read Grillparzer’s Sappho (1818) in an Italian translation, admired his adaptation of the classical tale to modern requirements, again focusing on the Pyrrhonian rather than Platonic strain of the Classical Tradition.760 The fatal love of Sappho, the originally happy and selfcontrolled female poet of Lesbos, for Phaon had a special attraction for the Romantic Disillusionists. Two decades earlier, Mary Robinson had published a sequence of 44 sonnets – mostly Sappho’s wild complaints at her loss of reason and self-control in a tyrannical love that would inevitably lead to her self-destruction – in the manner of Ovid’s Heroides. The sonnets reflect Robinson’s own devastating experience both with her husband and her subsequent lovers, including the Prince of Wales: 758 Platen, Anteros, 1812, 9–14, in : Sämtliche Werke, ed. Max Koch – Erich Petzet, Historischkritische Ausgabe, 12 vols., Leipzig 1910, VI. 180. 759 Platen, Tristan, 1825, 1–5, ed. cit. II.94–95. Stanza 1 of 3. 760 Byron, Journal, 12 January 1821, in: Letters and Journals, VIII. 25. See G. Hoffmeister, Byron und der europäische Byronismus, 116.

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Vain is the hope the magic to unbind, The potent mischief riots in the brain, Grasps every thought, and burns in ev’ry vein, Till in the heart the Tyrant lives enshrin’d.761

The sceptical view of love expounded by Robinson, Byron, Grillparzer, and Platen anticipates the experience of the speakers in D.G. Rossetti’s The House of Life (1870, 1881) that, in the triad of the cardinal virtues, faith dies first, followed by love, then hope. The loss of the metaphysics of love entails a view of it that is no longer Platonically integrative. On the contrary, love is reduced to a selfconsuming ecstasy and disillusionment in which nuptial sleep appears as a final separation rather than a lasting union, ending either in the death of the heart’s love or in the physical death of the beloved partner.762 “Death-in–Love”, a sonnet that Rossetti added to the sequence in 1870 and that reflects on his experience with the death of his modern Beatrice and wife Elizabeth Siddal Rossetti eight years earlier, evokes a procession of Life in which a veiled woman – Death, or La Morte – follows, who destroys all illusions of vernal vigour and innovation, claiming domination over Amor and his standard-bearer : ‘Behold, there is no breath I and this Love are one, and I am Death.’763

Though Rossetti did not think of the thirst for military glory as a cause of death and wrote in a heavily Decadent and pre-Symbolist style, his disillusionist association of love and death, eros kai thanatos, is distinctly Byronic. In Byron’s work, love and military glory appear as contrary passions to which he attaches contrary moral values, yet they have one thing in common. Sadistic fate has made them not only vain, but also dangerous. Man is doomed to pay a high price for an airy nothing. In his poetic drama Heaven and Earth (1822), like his earlier poetic drama Cain (1821), a perverted mystery play, Byron demonstrated this using the Judaeo-Christian myth of the Flood. God the Almighty Tyrant, Liar, and Sadist drowned his first creation because his angels and mortals made love, imitating their Creator in the very feeling out of which he pretended to have created them. In the words of the amorous angel Samiasa: Was not man made in high Jehovah’s image? Did God not love what he had made? And what

761 Robinson, Sappho and Phaon, Sonnet XVII, 1796, lines 5–8, in: Selected Poems, ed. cit. 165. 762 D.G. Rossetti, The House of Life, Nuptial Sleep and Love and Hope, 1870, 1881, in: Collected Poetry and Prose, 130, 146. 763 Rossetti, The House of Life, Death-in–Love, 1870, lines 13–14, in: Collected Poetry and Prose, 149.

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Do we but imitate and emulate His love unto created love?764

The drama’s most pious believer, Japhet, is also its most wretched sufferer, who gives repeated expression to his experience and insight that love, with its false promises of peace and eternity, brings nothing but misery and death. The sufferings of Byron’s titular hero Mazeppa, who is tied up and turned away on a wild horse, are too obviously reminiscent of the sufferings of the Ancient Mariner to escape notice.765 However, unlike Coleridge’s bird-slaughterer, Byron’s hero suffers for loving, not for killing.766 When reviewing his life, the old, scarred, and battle-hardened soldier Mazeppa finds his love affair with Theresa proved to be the most dangerous adventure of his entire and long career, just as Byron did with his love affair with the nineteen-year-old Teresa Guiccioli married to the fifty-eight-year-old Count Alessandro Guiccioli from Ravenna. Byron’s concept of the dangerousness of any involvement in love went back to a literary topos, enlivened by his traumatic experience of an inconstant mother who always threatened to replace extreme love with extreme hatred. And his later acquaintances with women, especially with Caroline Lamb and Annabella Milbanke, did little to erase this early impression, as attested by numerous remarks in his letters and journals: […] I am thus far on my way to […] the Yungfrau (that is the ‘Wild woman’ being interpreted – as it is so perverse a mountain that no other sex would suit it), […]767

Byron’s friend and biographer Thomas Moore observed the poet’s unhappy childhood with an irresponsible mother in his posthumous Letters and Journals of Lord Byron (1830). Benjamin Disraeli then created a combined portrait of Byron’s mother and wife in the destructive Lady Annabel Herbert in his novel Venetia (1837), and Charles Dickens may have used it as a model for the equally destructive Miss Havisham in Great Expectations (1861).768 Disraeli’s Planta764 Byron, Heaven and Earth, 3. 477–480. 765 Byron, Mazeppa, 1819, lines 375–795, and Coleridge, The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, 1798, lines 81–546. 766 Also cf. Gleckner, Byron and the Ruins of Paradise, 309. Gleckner makes the point by way of a casual literary comparison, without realizing the similarities between the two narrative poems. 767 Byron, Letter to Augusta Leigh, 17 September 1816, in: Letters and Journals, V. 94. There is an unconscious seriousness in Byron’s bantering, as also in his mocking comment on his mother-in-law’s recovery from illness (Letter to Thomas Moore, 28 April 1821, VIII. 105): “Lady Noel has, as you say, been dangerously ill; but it may console you to learn that she is dangerously well again.” Also see Byron, Hints from Horace, lines 663–664: Orpheus, we learn from Ovid and Lempriere, Led all wild beasts but women by the ear. 768 Charles C. Nickerson, Byron, Shelley and Miss Havisham, in: TLS, 5478 (28 March 2008), 14–15.

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genet Cadurcis, modelled on Byron, is both an ingenious spoiler and the unhappy victim of his character, moulded by the intolerable education bestowed upon him by his mother Lady Annabel Herbert, who alternately caresses him as her “dear boy” and insults him as her “little brat”.769 It should, however, be noted that Byron’s recurring motif of man’s life threatened by woman, la femme fatale, is complemented by one in reverse: l’homme fatal. Byron did not blindly follow biblical and pseudo-scientific traditions and one-sidedly portray woman as man’s genetic destroyer, as became the dominant fashion in the Decadence and Fin de SiHcle (P8trus Borel, Charles Baudelaire, August Strindberg, Oscar Wilde, Oskar Kokoschka, Otto Weininger). Polidori, who drew heavily on Byron, created just such a tragically unwilling femme fatale with his titular hero’s beloved angelic Louisa in Ernestus Berchtold (1819). Raising Ernestus’s passion for love and war in his own and his country’s suposed interests, she unwittingly destroys both him and herself. Both men and women lose their Platonic illusions of an all-uniting, all-healing love, finding themselves subject to an irresistible and unjustly destructive force – l’amour fatal – analogous to la guerre fatale. Nevertheless, traditional anti-feminism occasionally manifested itself in Byron’s life and writings, especially in the context of the old motif of woman’s revenge for spurned love, fermented by his wife’s destruction of his moral reputation after their divorce. Although there is no trace of vindictiveness about her, Haid8e evokes such sinister reflections: And their revenge is as the tiger’s spring, Deadly, and quick, and crushing […]770

Further examples of the traditionally anti-feminist fear of woman’s vindictiveness are Byron’s treatments of and references to Salome’s vengeance on John the Baptist and, in Byron’s succession, Borel’s treatment of the wife of Potiphar’s revenge on Joseph in his sinister novel Madame Putiphar (1839), based on court rumours about Madame Pompadour. The danger of love in general manifests itself in the adventures as well as in the name of Don Juan. His love affair with Donna Julia leads to his banishment and a narrow escape from death in a shipwreck, and to Donna Julia’s ruin. His love affair with Haid8e leads to his imprisonment and an equally narrow escape from death by the sword, and to Haid8e’s ruin. His love affair with DudF leads to his condemnation and another narrow escape from being drowned in a sack, and to DudF’s ruin. The literary tradition of his name also suggests that one of his 769 Disraeli, Venetia, 1837, book 1, chapter 6, in: The Bradenham Edition of the Novels and Tales of Benjamin Disraeli, ed. Philip Guedalla, London 1926–1927, VII. 23–33. 770 Byron, Don Juan, 2. 199. 6–7.

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subsequent love affairs would prove fatal for him (and for his subsequent amours),771 just as they had for the heroes (and heroines) of Byron’s earlier poetical tales – the Giaour, Selim, Conrad, Alp, Hugo, and Mazeppa – for the heroes (and heroines) of Byron’s dramas – Manfred and Sardanapalus – and, finally, for Tasso – the hero and speaker of Byron’s dramatic monologue.772 It is not merely a coincidence that Selim, in The Bride of Abydos (1813), bravely defending himself against the soldiers of the tyrant Giaffir and on the verge of his rescue, falls to Giaffir’s shot in an unguarded moment when he glances back to see his beloved Zuleika, who thereupon dies of grief: Ah! wherefore did he turn to look For her his eye but sought in vain? That pause, that fatal gaze he took, Hath doom’d his death, or fix’d his chain. Sad proof, in peril and in pain, How late will Lover’s hope remain!773

Nor is it equally an accidental invention of Byron’s that Alp the Renegade is felled by a bullet in an unguarded moment when paralysed with the unexpected news, sneeringly imparted to him at the height of the battle by his deadly enemy Minotti, the Venetian governor of Corinth and Francesca’s despotic father, that his beloved Francesca is dead.774 Analogously, Conrad the Corsair loses the battle against the tyrant Pasha Seyd, one which he is on the point of winning, because at the critical moment instead of pursuing his routed enemies his love of women makes him hesitate to save Seyd’s harem-slaves.775 The beautiful Gulnare, rescued on that occasion and firmly resolved to stab Seyd for her love of Conrad, is a symptomatic instance of l’amour fatal. Conrad’s rescue of her leads to the loss of his war, the loss of his beloved, yet forsaken, Medora (who commits suicide on hearing mistaken news of his death), and the loss of the sense of his life. Furthermore, Seyd’s failure to recognize any such danger leads to his immediate death: Ah! little reck’d that chief of womanhood – Which frowns ne’er quell’d, nor menaces subdued; 771 See Byron, Letter to John Murray, 16 February 1821, VIII. 78. For a comparative study of the Don Juan legend from seventeenth- to twentieth-century European literature see Leo Weinstein, The Metamorphoses of Don Juan, Stanford CA 1959. 772 Tasso, according to legend, was, like Byron, penalized with “Imputed madness” for a love affair against social conventions; Byron, The Lament of Tasso, 1817, 1. 4. Edward Everett Bostetter points out the tragic possibilities inherent in Juan’s situation at Norman Abbey (Bostetter, The Romantic Ventriloquists, 246). 773 Byron, The Bride of Abydos, 1813, 2. 563–68. 774 Byron, The Siege of Corinth, 1816, lines 802–851. 775 Byron, The Corsair, 1814, 2. 225–252.

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And little deem’d he what thy heart, Gulnare! When soft could feel, and when incensed could dare.776

Unsuited as he was to the domestic qualities of Medora, the Pasha’s prisoner Conrad, disillusioned by life, has now found another disillusioned prisoner in Gulnare, who becomes his double in embodying a mix of vices and virtues: a Byronic heroine matching the Byronic hero.777 The triangle, in which Conrad is placed between two women – one domestic, the other wild – is neither clearly the Romantic triangle of Rousseau, Goethe, and Mackenzie nor the anti-Romantic one of Jane Austen and Walter Scott.778 Instead it is marked by the pressure of choice that must kill the torn, tortured Byronic hero. Pushkin based his narrative poem The Fountain of Bakhchisaray (1824) on these oriental tales. Giray, the chief of the Crimean Tartars, finds happiness in power, victories in war, and love in a harem full of obedient slaves that includes the devoted and beautiful Zarem, whose love all men desire and yet who loves him alone. Nevertheless he becomes enamoured with Maria, a Polish captive and princess, whose virginity he cannot claim. Again, the hero’s position in a triangle between two contrary types of woman proves fatal. Maria dies, possibly murdered by her rival Zarem, and the mute harem slaves kill the suspect Zarem. Disillusioned by life like Conrad, Giray is left despairing, waging wars in foreign lands, then lamenting his cruel fate in the fountain of tears that he erects in his gorgeous oriental palace, his happiness forever destroyed by his unreasonable yet unconquerable passion. The impossibility of a constructive dialogue between the cultures, represented in the culminating scene where the Muslim Zarem visits the Christian Maria, underscores the poem’s Romantic Disillusionism. It is only after death that a conciliation of the two women and cultures can take place, and then only in the marble decorations of the fountain; in art, not in actual life. In kinship with such piteous lovers and soldiers, Byron’s Don Juan is the helpless victim of a dangerous fate caused by dangerous women, which drives him from one perilous love affair to another, and to his destined end.779 This detheologized inversion of Tirso de Molina’s original handling of the matter of Don Juan and his paramours makes them all perpetrators as well as victims; homme fatal and femmes fatales. They are common sufferers of one of the deterministic world’s diseases, as dispensed by a tyrannical God. With all due respect for the 776 777 778 779

Ibid. 3. 196–199. Cf. Byron, Don Juan, 2. 199. 1–8. Andrew Elfenbein, Byron and the Victorians, Cambridge 1995, 23–25. Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, Oxford 1975, passim. Cf. Byron, Don Juan, 4. 73. 7–8: […] let none think to fly the danger, For soon or late Love is his own avenger.

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intellectual brilliance of Mario Praz’s study of the Romantic aestheticization of sensual experience and its lapse into erotic deviations, it is easy to detect the ideological bias in Praz’s view of the infernal vampire Byron, who feasted on the agonies of his tortured women both in life and literature, akin to the Marquis de Sade.780 Biographically, Byron was no Satanic Lord781 and his wife no Patient Griselda.782 And in point of literary creation, it cannot escape the notice of an unprejudiced critic that Byron’s most active lovers, the Giaour or Manfred, do not destroy their partners in love willingly, but through the providential constitution of things whose victims they become themselves. Manfred’s topical reference to the ill-fated Lacedaemonian general Pausanias, who “slew That which he loved, unknowing what he slew”,783 and his begging for Astarte’s forgiveness,784 are hardly compatible with a vampire’s delectation in arbitrary butchering. Even King Herod I, the real murderer in Byron’s Hebrew Melodies (1815), who has wilfully ordered the execution of his beloved wife Mariamne in frenzy’s raving jealousy, torments himself in wild remorse and vain prayer for pardon rather than fiendishly feasting on his crime.785 The case of Don Juan supplies an even stronger argument against Praz. Juan’s role is different from Childe Harold’s – it is that of the passive, seduced lover, a significant inversion of the conventional homme fatal, the actively seducing, wilfully destroying irresistible lover in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century versions of the Don Juan legend.786 Barely escaped death by shipwreck, Juan opens his eyes and sees the next fatal claimant of his love: Haid8e. Barely escaped death by the sword, he becomes the slave of the imperious Gulbeyaz. Barely escaped death by being 780 Praz, The Romantic Agony, 1933, New York 1960, 61–81. Translated from the Italian by Angus Davidson. 781 Ibid. 81. 782 Ibid. 73. 783 Byron, Manfred, II/2, 185–186. The story is that of Pausanias and Cleonice, as told by Plutarch in his Life of Cimon and retold by Goethe in his review of Manfred: Über Kunst und Altertum, 11, 1820, in: Sämtliche Werke, ed. cit. XX. 456. Here, Goethe’s insight into Manfred-Byron’s true suffering was both acute and compassionate: “Welch ein verwundetes Herz muß der Dichter haben, der sich eine solche Begebenheit aus der Vorwelt heraussucht, sie sich aneignet und sein tragisches Ebenbild damit belastet.” 784 Byron, Manfred, II/4, 153. For Byron’s personal dislike of vampires and vampirism also see his Letter to the Editor of Galignani’s Messenger, 27–4–1819, in: Letters and Journals, VI. 118–119, and his self-tormenting, regretful words to his wife, “… it is my destiny to ruin all I come near” (Ethel Colburn Mayne, The Life and Letters of Anne Isabella Lady Noel Byron, New York 1930, 190). 785 Byron, Hebrew Melodies, Herod’s Lament for Mariamne, 1815, lines 1–24. In order to adapt the story to his own purposes, Byron deviated from the historical facts in making Herod I, in his dramatic monologue, express love and repentance, whereas, in reality, Herod had married Mariamne for nothing but her Hasmonean descent to justify his usurpation of the Jewish throne, and had led a wretched married life. 786 Leo Weinstein, The Metamorphoses of Don Juan, 81.

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drowned in a sack, he becomes a soldier at Ismail. Barely escaped death in battle, he is sent on a diplomatic mission to England and becomes the object of the amorous pursuits of Aurora Raby, the Duchess of Fitz-Fulke, and Lady Adeline Amundeville, the “fair most fatal Juan ever met”.787 The inescapable danger into which this latter adventure would have brought the lovers, had the story not been left unfinished by Byron’s death, is here foreshadowed: I’m ‘at my old Lunes’ – digression – and forget The Lady Adeline Amundeville; The fair most fatal Juan ever met, Although she was not evil, nor meant ill; But Destiny and Passion spread the net, (Fate is a good excuse for our own will) And caught them.788

Julia, Haid8e, Gulbeyaz, and DudF are described with the same halo of fatality and danger hovering above them. Julia, Juan’s first seductress, is a proud beauty of Moorish origin, with large, dark eyes betraying the erotic fire and boiling blood she struggles to conceal.789 The very blackness of her eyes reveals her passion, increased by repression in the “burning core”790 of her heart, and portends imminent danger “as the blackest sky Foretells the heaviest tempest”.791 Her magical charm threatens to destroy both the epic hero and herself, just as the same charm of Circe, Dido, and Armida threatened to destroy Ulysses, Aeneas, Rinaldo, and ultimately themselves:792 […] but ne’er magician’s wand Wrought change with all Armida’s fairy art Like what this light touch left on Juan’s heart.793

Similarly, the black eyes of the ill-fated Haid8e are associated with death,794 and an image of unexpected, deadly danger characterizes the glances from those raven-tinged eyes:

787 Byron, Don Juan, 13. 12. 3. 788 Ibid. 13. 12. 1–7. Note the sceptic’s change from the assumption of necessity to that of free will, in defiance of dogmatism. 789 Ibid. 1. 60–61. 790 Ibid. 1. 72. 5. For the strengthening of the passion of love by hypocritical repression also cf. the images characterizing the apparent indifference of Adeline Amundeville, ibid. 13. 36– 39. 791 Ibid. 1. 73. 2–3. 792 Homer, Odyssey, canto 10; Virgil, Aeneid, canto 4 ; Tasso, Gerusalemme Liberata, cantos 4, 7, 10, 14, 15, 16, 20. 793 Byron, Don Juan, 1. 71. 6–8. 794 Ibid. 2. 117. 1–2.

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’Tis as the snake late coil’d, who pours his length, And hurls at once his venom and his strength.795

While Juan is soundly asleep, recovering his health, Haid8e bends over him “as death”,796 drinking his scarcely drawn breath,797 a vampire-like image suggestive of Salome dancing off the head of John the Baptist,798 in blatant contrast to the subsequent comparison of Haid8e with “an angel o’er the dying Who die in righteousness”.799 And again, later, when Juan falls asleep in Haid8e’s arms, the thought of death overshadows the tender joy of the most natural and least sinful of fated loves: There lies the thing we love with all its errors And all its charms, like death without its terrors.800

Sheridan Le Fanu was later to follow Byron in his Gothic novels and tales, where he inextricably connected love with hatred, pain, destruction, death, and vampirism, as in his collections The Purcell Papers (posth. 1880) and In a Glass Darkly (1872). Thus, for instance, the highly ambiguous lesbian lovers Carmilla and Laura – each the other’s doppelganger – love and hate, and caress and torture each other to the brink of physical breakdown and death.801 The happiness of Byron’s two unlawful yet innocent lovers will soon be cruelly shattered, and Byron’s complaint about this injustice of Providence is quite serious, though, a stanza later, he again turns it into ridicule and resumes his habitual attitude of resignation to the unalterable state of things as they are: Oh Love! what is it in this world of ours Which makes it fatal to be loved? Ah why With cypress branches hast thou wreathed thy bowers, And made thy best interpreter a sigh? As those who dote on odours pluck the flowers, And place them on their breast – but place to die! Thus the frail beings we would fondly cherish Are laid within our bosoms but to perish.802 795 Ibid. 2. 117. 7–8. For the raven as a literary symbol foreboding death and destruction see for example Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, 11/3, 97; Troilus and Cressida, V/2, 191; Macbeth, I/5, 39. 796 Byron, Don Juan, 2. 143. 7. 797 Ibid. 2. 143. 8. 798 Byron, The Waltz, lines 87–88. Byron confuses the names here. The fatal dancer before Herod Antipas, son to King Herod I (the Great), is not Herodias, but Herodias’s beautiful and seductive daughter Salome. 799 Byron, Don Juan, 2. 144. 1–2. 800 Ibid. 2. 197. 7–8. 801 Jochen Achilles, Sheridan Le Fanu und die schauerromantische Tradition, Tübingen 1991, 132. 802 Byron, Don Juan, 3. 2. 1–8.

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The next perilous adventure in Juan’s career is his sale as a slave and secret lover to the beautiful and imperious Gulbeyaz, the fourth spouse of the Turkish Sultan. Her danger appears in her first encounter with Juan, who is absolutely at her mercy. Byron compares her eyes to those of an antelope, which ancient literature represented as a wild and dangerous beast like the panther, the tiger, the boar, and the wolf;803 and the allusions to Venus and Paphos – as well as Gulbeyaz’s sensual ecstasy towards the initially cold Juan – suggest the tragic love of Venus for the ill-fated Adonis: The lady, rising up with such an air As Venus rose with from the wave, on them Bent like an antelope a Paphian pair Of eyes, which put out each surrounding gem; And raising up an arm […]804

DudF, Gulbeyaz’s rival for Juan’s love, also partakes of the nature of the fatal Venus, albeit her character at first appears to stand in sharp contrast to Gulbeyaz: A kind of sleepy Venus seemed DudF Yet very fit to ‘murder sleep’ in those Who gazed upon her cheek’s transcendent hue, Her Attic forehead and her Phidian nose.805

This calm and quiet harmony of her outward bearing makes her all the more dangerous. Her comparison to the Age of Gold only holds true on the basis of the notorious ancient etymology which derived a word from its opposite: “lucus a non lucendo, canis a non canendo”. As the Age of Gold is so called because “gold was yet unknown”,806 the narrator here intimates that DudF is called kind and gentle because, in fact, she is wild and cruel.807 The oxymoron “silent thunder”, another simile that Byron invents for her characterization, gives further emphasis to this contrast between appearance and reality.808 The gentleness of her manner serves DudF as a safe means of satisfying the wildness of her nature, a tool which helps her successfully accomplish her plans and which makes her, the slave, triumph even over the beautiful and mighty Sultana. Spellbound by her charms, Juan thoughtlessly surrenders himself to her love, fully aware that this new love affair will arouse the Sultana’s jealousy and expose his life to mortal 803 Spenser, The Fairy Queen, 1. 6. 26 1–5. Also cf. Caroline Lamb, Letter to Byron, 9 August 1812, in Marchand, Byron: A Portrait, 130. 804 Byron, Don Juan, 5. 96. 1–5. 805 Ibid. 6. 42. 1–4. 806 Ibid. 6. 55. 2 For this ancient etymology also see ibid. 11. 21. 2. 807 Ibid. 6. 55. 1–8. 808 Ibid. 6. 57. 7–8.

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danger, just as Byron had surrendered himself to the love of Teresa Guiccioli in spite of his suspicion of her husband’s possible readiness to have his rival secretly murdered.809 For a young man who, by mere good or bad luck, escapes such tangible, physical dangers, love has prepared another snare that will necessarily ruin him – the rational motivation, though not the real emotional reason, for Byron’s final abandonment of Teresa Guiccioli.810 Love spares him the death of the body to lead him first to an even crueller fate – the further breaking of his heart and split nature: The tree will wither long before it fall; The hull drives on, though mast and sail be torn; The roof-tree sinks, but moulders on the hall In massy hoariness; the ruin’d wall Stands when its wind-worn battlements are gone; The bars survive the captive they enthral; The day drags through though storms keep out the sun; And thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on: Even as a broken mirror […]811

The imagery of progressive ruin until final physical death recurred in Musset’s verse letter to Lamartine on Byron, where the life of man is seen as a repeated cycle of hopes and disappointments. The illogical nature of man is the result of a misconstruction on the part of his Creator, which no act of salvation has been able to repair : Son mis8rable cœur est fait de telle sorte, Qu’il faut incessament qu’une ruine en sorte; Que la mort soit son terme, il ne l’ignore pas, 809 Byron, Letter to John Cam Hobhouse, 17 May 1819, in: Letters and Journals, VI. 130–131: “[…] the Cavalier Conte G[uiccioli] her respected Lord – is shrewdly suspected of two assassinations already – […] be that as it may – every thing is to be risked for a woman one likes.” Also cf. Byron, Letter to John Cam Hobhouse, 30 July 1819, ibid. VI. 188; and Byron, Ravenna Journal, 28 January 1821, VIII. 36–37, where the poet planned to write a tragedy in five acts on the story of Francesca da Rimini and her lover Paolo, both murdered by her husband, Paolo’s brother, whom she had married for political convenience. Byron apparently never wrote his tragedy, though he had translated the Francesca da Rimini episode from Dante’s Inferno in 1820. 810 Cf. Blessington, Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. cit. 49 : “[…] I am worn out in feelings; for, though only thirty-six, I feel sixty in mind, and am less capable than ever of those nameless attentions that all women, but, above all, Italian women, require.” 811 Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 3. 32. 2–9 and 3. 33. 1. Here, however, the heart is not broken with the unquenchable fever of love, but with the unquenchable fever of that other great passion, the vain expectation of immortality in military glory (ibid. 3. 31. 1–9): if anything can recall the dead of Waterloo to life, it is the archangel’s, not glory’s, trumpet.

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Et, marchant / la mort, il meurt / chaque pas. […] Il ne reste de nous qu’un cadavre vivant; Le d8sespoir l’habite, et le n8ant l’attend.812

Such accumulated comparisons suggest that the heart’s living on in a shattered guise, still, cold, and bloodless,813 is not a survival but the ruinous period of withering decay between virtual death and actual physical collapse. The death of the heart precedes that of the body, and any acts of love continue as mere physico-mechanical reflexes without any paradisiacal illusions and aspirations – a purposeless, uselessness, and meaninglessness that Schopenhauer and Thomson were later to illustrate with the image of a face- and handless clock running down. Byron characterized the same death through images of parching drought and barren sterilization, in his usual way of describing the illusory and suicidal efforts of the hot passionate soul yearning for eternity. After the death of the heart remain The furrows of long thought, and dried-up tears, Which, ebbing, leave a sterile track behind, O’er which all heavily the journeying years Plod the last sands of life, – where not a flower appears.814

The “orphans of the heart”, whom the speaker advises to contemplate the shattered thrones and temples of Rome,815 are men of broken hearts – ruins amidst ruins, like Childe Harold and Byron himself.816 It was the same speaker who, in a later poem on the death of John Edleston (alias Thyrza), felt like an aged “time-worn slave”817 set free with a heart “cold as e’en the dead can be”,818 an expired heart reawakened with only torturing thoughts of a better past, when “love and life alike were new”.819 It was a similarly disillusioned speaker who, in one of Byron’s later poems written to fit existent melodies, “Stanzas for Music” (1815),820 woefully deplored the “mortal coldness”821 of his heart and the “wither’d waste”822 of his life in stanzas that adumbrate the beauties of Baude812 813 814 815 816 817 818 819

Musset, Lettre / M. de Lamartine, 1836, in: Po8sies complHtes, 333. Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 3. 33. 6–7. Ibid. 3. 3. 6–9. Also cf. ibid. 3. 6. 9: “[…] my crush’d feelings’ dearth”. Ibid. 4. 78. 1–9. Ibid. 4. 25. 3. Byron, One struggle more, and I am free, line 37. Ibid. line 47. Ibid. line 42. On Byron’s early homosexual love affairs (as well as his aristocratic pride and revolutionary disposition) see Paul Elledge, Lord Byron at Harrow School, Baltimore and London 2000, passim. 820 Byron, Stanzas for Music, March 1815, line 9. 821 Ibid. line 20. 822 For Byron’s Romantic practice of writing original poems to fit traditional melodies see

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laire, for whom “L’amour n’a plus de go0t” and “Le Printemps adorable a perdu son odeur”:823 THERE’S not a joy the world can give like that it takes away, When the glow of early thought declines in feeling’s dull decay ; ’Tis not on youth’s smooth cheek the blush alone, which fades so fast, But the tender bloom of heart is gone, ere youth itself be past.824

So in the course of his amorous career we observe an increasing disillusionment in Don Juan. His initial expectation of regaining a terrestrial paradise through acts of love proves to be a mere illusion. The dream of living happily on Haid8e’s fortunate isle forever evaporates. The constant confrontation with things as they are progressively supplants the vision of things as the soul would have them, convincing Juan, quite unromantically, that there is no reality in the chimerical desires of his fancy. Juan’s experience confirms the truth of Lucifer’s lecture to Cain: love is but ignorance, and knowledge quenches love, not least with respect to God.825 However, the hero in whom Byron most impressively demonstrated the disastrous effects of the heart’s death through love is Childe Harold. When Harold is introduced to the reader, his disillusionment is complete and his amorous feelings are dead. He even believes himself beyond joy and sorrow, seemingly secure and invulnerable in guarded coldness.826 This error of sensibility is soon discovered. His soul survives in a disintegrated and ruined state,

823 824

825 826

Joseph Slater, Byron’s Hebrew Melodies, in: Studies in Philology, 49 (1952), 75–94, and Thomas L. Ashton, Byron’s Hebrew Melodies, London 1972, passim. Baudelaire, Les fleurs du mal, Le go0t du n8ant, 1857, lines 7 and 10, in: Œuvres complHtes, 72. Byron, Stanzas for Music, March 1815, lines 1–4. At the age of thirty-five, Byron, in a Letter to Count Alfred D’Orsay dated 22 April 1823, expressed his regret that the young twenty-one-year-old count should have been disillusioned so early in his life (Letters and Journals, X. 156): “But I am sorry for you ; for if you are so well acquainted with life at your age – what will become of you when the illusion is still more dissipated ?” Also cf. Byron, Fare Thee Well, 17 August 1816, lines 57–60, addressed to his divorced wife Annabella Milbanke and brilliantly translated by Heinrich Heine in his student days in Bonn 1819–1820 (Sämtliche Schriften, I. 388–390): Fare thee well! Thus disunited, Torn from every nearer tie, Sear’d in heart, and lone, and blighted, More than this I scarce can die. For the destruction of Byron’s youthful idealism and the unbalancing of his soul by experiences of unfortunate love see the Maddalo figure in P.B. Shelley’s Julian and Maddalo (1818), and for the ongoing controversy involved in the two poets’ works, Charles E. Robinson, Shelley and Byron: The Snake and Eagle Wreathed in Fight, Baltimore 1976, passim. Byron, Cain, I/1, 123–127. Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 3. 10. 1–5.

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leaving all his non-amorous and non-sympathetic feelings alive, and, in frustrated fits, continues to seek other ways to immortality than love.827 Impelled by “the strong Necessity of loving”,828 Harold had too frequently gratified his erotic needs not to comprehend, like Byron himself, that sexual promiscuity yields no lasting satisfaction to the human soul languishing for an imagined paradise. Satiated, cloyed, disgusted, unjustly branded with a sin which is no such thing, he is doomed to roam restlessly and aimlessly, like Cain and Ahasuerus, the Old Testament and the New Testament Wandering Jew : It is that settled, ceaseless gloom The fabled Hebrew wanderer bore; That will not look beyond the tomb, But cannot hope for rest before.829

Here again, typical of Byron, a religious concept – the disintegration of the soul through sin – has been de-mystified, secularized, and read as an indictment of the ways of God to man. The voice that pronounces Harold guilty830 is the voice of conscience, as opposed to that of rational scepticism. Harold’s final physical death, when he fades away “into Destruction’s mass” at the end of the aimless pilgrimage of his life,831 is a benefit to him after the death of his heart. Human nature causes him, like all others, to fall victim to love’s false magic sooner or later, that “Cherub-hydra”832 with its “dear delusive shape”.833 The mortal danger with which love threatens both the bodies and the souls of its helpless votaries vexed and irritated Byron all the more for its total vanity, being the Providence of a despotic God. The vanity of love is a theme running through Byron’s oeuvre, including the poem written on the occasion of his thirty-sixth birthday, less than three months before his death at Missolonghi. Byron was no Keats, who on the sight of an urn or on the sound of a nightingale’s voice could ecstatically project himself out of the bounds of time and space into a fancied, romantic world of truth correlative to earthly beauty, freezing the scene at its height before the lapse into decay,

827 828 829 830

Ibid. 3. 15. 1–9. Ibid. 4. 125. 2–3. Ibid. To Inez, 5. 1–4. For an analysis of these two separate voices in Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, analogous to the “empirical I” and the “poetic I” in Dante’s Divina Commedia, see Gleckner, Byron and the Ruins of Paradise, 39–90, 225–250, 267–297. 831 Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 4. 164. 1–9. 832 Ibid. 1. 65. 8. 833 Ibid. 1. 65. 9. Note the oxymora characterizing love’s enticing appearance and dangerous reality.

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For ever warm and still to be enjoyed, For ever panting, and for ever young –834

He rather anticipated Paul Verlaine who, in his nightingale poem, inverted the direction of the Positive Romantic bird’s flight from the clouds down to earth, from vernal joy to autumnal melancholy, from expectations of love to memories of loss, “Plus rien que la voix c8l8brant l’Absente”.835 Byron’s conviction that love was a passing passion for the young which could not be gratified beyond the age of twenty-five or thirty, and his consequent fear of wrinkles and grey hairs, haunted the unmetaphysically and empirically disposed Byron from the point at which he left Harrow for Cambridge:836 Who with the weight of years would wish to bend, When Youth itself survives young Love and Joy? Alas! when mingling souls forget to blend, Death hath but little left him to destroy! Ah! happy years! once more who would not be a boy?837

834 Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn, 1819, lines 26–27, in: Poems, 535. Byron, in contrast, even felt that his fancying the presence of his late beautiful and beloved chorister John Edleston and of his distant daughter Augusta Ada led to mere frustration and a sickly, feverish brain: see Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 2. 95–96; 3. 6–7; and, with general application, 3. 42. 1–9 (note here the usual heat and fever imagery in Byron’s descriptions of the mind’s and the imagination’s vain efforts). For the limitations and failures of the mind and imagination due to man’s fragile corporeality, see the excellent article by Ward Pafford, Byron and the Mind of Man, 105–127. 835 Verlaine, PoHmes saturniens, Le rossignol, 1866, line 11, in Œuvres po8tiques complHtes, ed. Y.-G. le Dantec – Jacques Borel, BibliothHque de la Pl8iade, Paris 1962, 74. 836 See Byron, Detached Thoughts, 72 (1821), in: Letters and Journals, IX. 37: “[…] it was one of the deadliest and heaviest feelings of my life to feel that I was no longer a boy. From that moment [of leaving Harrow] I began to grow old in my own esteem – and in my esteem age is not estimable.” Byron left Harrow in the summer of 1805, aged 17. Three to four years later, in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (line 1057), he nostalgically boasted of having “so callous grown, so changed since youth”. 837 Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 2. 23. 5–9. For Harold’s irreparable loss of love also see ibid. 2. 31. 1–9. This death of the heart occurs even in youth: cf. ibid. 2. 98. 8–9 and 3. 5. 1–3. Byron, Manfred, III/1, 138–148 : Look on me! there is an order Of mortals on the earth, who do become Old in their youth, and die ere middle age, Without the violence of warlike death; Some perishing of pleasure – some of study – Some worn with toil – some of mere weariness – Some of disease – and some insanity – And some of withered, or of broken hearts; For this last is a malady which slays More than are numbered in the lists of Fate, Taking all shapes, and bearing many names.

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This melancholic meditation on the satiated lover’s death of heart, published when Byron was only twenty-four, foreshadows his later complaints in Don Juan: Who would not sigh, Ai ai tam Juheqeiam! That hath a memory or that had a heart? Alas! her star must wane like that of Dian; Ray fades on ray, as years on years depart.838

In Don Juan the complaint of the short-lived nature of happy love no longer stands alone. When surfeited man has, even in his youth, exceeded the age of a lover and “mingling souls forget to blend”,839 giving Plato the lie, repeated disillusionment and the awareness of wishful thinking leave a void. This is the cause of Childe Harold’s “life-abhorring gloom”.840 The narrator of Don Juan spurns such romantic lamentations and turns back to a realistic analysis of the colder passions which must fill that void after the heart’s death, ambition and avarice – vices that had been detailed seven years earlier in Byron’s memorable portrait of “Life’s little tale, so oft, so vainly told”841 in Hints from Horace (MS 1811). The poetic mode changes, chameleon-like, from Neoclassical to Romantic to Neoclassical, but the idea remains the same: Launch’d into life, extinct his early fire, He [man] apes the selfish prudence of his sire; 838 Byron, Don Juan, 16. 109. 1–4. The imagery of these lines recalls the famous lyric in Byron’s Letter to Thomas Moore, 28 February 1817, in: Letters and Journals, V. 176, expressing the poet’s ebbing love under the images of the inconstant moon’s fading light and the sword’s wearing out its sheath: […] I find ‘the sword wearing out the scabbard’, though I have but just turned the comer of twenty-nine. So, we’ll go no more a roving So late into the night, Though the heart be still as loving, And the moon be still as bright. For the sword outwears its sheath, And the soul wears out the breast, And the heart must pause to breathe, And Love itself have rest. Though the night was made for loving, And the day returns too soon, Yet we’ll go no more a roving By the light of the moon. For a stimulating formal interpretation of the poem in the light of Byron’s complete poetical works in conscious opposition to its imaginative disintegrators see Hans-Jürgen Diller, Byron: So We’ll Go No More A-Roving, in: Versdichtung der englischen Romantik, ed. Riese – Riesner, Berlin 1968, 251–262. 839 Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 2. 23. 7. 840 Ibid. 1. 83. 8. 841 Byron, Hints from Horace, MS 1811, rev. MS 1820, publ. posth. 1831, lines 220–262.

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Marries for money, chooses friends for rank, Buys land, and shrewdly trusts not to the Bank; Sits in the Senate […] Manhood declines – age palsies every limb; He quits the scene – or else the scene quits him; Scrapes wealth, o’er each departing penny grieves, And avarice seizes all ambition leaves.842 My days of love are over, me no more The charms of maid, wife, and still less of widow Can make the fool of which they made before, In short, I must not lead the life I did do; The credulous hope of mutual minds is o’er, The copious use of claret is forbid too, So for a good old gentlemanly vice, I think I must take up with avarice.843

The frequency of these complaints annoys many readers of Byron, but these complaints are fully integrated into the intellectual substance of his work. The ephemeral nature of love is a symptom of its vanity. When men have reluctantly “passed life’s equinoctial line”,844 love will remain no more than an erotic impulse of nature, a sexual torso deprived of its original, illusory yearning for higher things and better days: Love lingers still, although ’twere late to wive; And as for other love, the illusion’s o’er’845

The thirty-three-year-old lover of Teresa Guiccioli keenly felt that degeneration himself. The Italian love letters of his last attachment, translated by Iris Origo, reveal his sentiment of loss and exhaustion. In his “Stanzas written on the Road 842 Ibid. lines 243–254. 843 Byron, Don Juan, 1. 216.1–8. Also cf. Blessington, Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. cit. 102– 103 : “Byron never wished to live to be old […] He said, it was a mistaken idea that passions subsided with age, as they only changed, and not for the better, Avarice usurping the place vacated by Love […] ‘And this,’ continued Byron, ‘is what age and experience brings us. No; let me not live to be old: give me youth, which is the fever of reason, and not age, which is the palsy. I remember my youth, when my heart overflowed with affection towards all who showed any symptom of liking towards me; and now, at thirty-six, no very advanced period of life, I can scarcely, by raking up the dying embers of affection in that same heart, excite even a temporary flame to warm my chilled feelings.’” and Byron, To the Countess of Blessington, lines 9–12 : I am ashes where once I was fire, And the bard in my bosom is dead; What I loved I now merely admire, And my heart is as grey as my head. 844 Byron, Don Juan, 13. 5. 4. 845 Ibid. 12. 2. 5–6.

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between Florence and Pisa” in November 1821, while he accompanied the divorced Teresa and her parents, the Gambas, to their exile, Byron complained that his wrinkled brow and hoary head betrayed the bygone days “of sweet two-andtwenty”,846 and that the laurels of fame were a poor substitute for the freshness of youth: What are garlands and crowns to the brow that is wrinkled? ’Tis but as a dead flower with May-dew besprinkled. Then away with all such from the head that is hoary! What care I for the wreaths that can only give glory!847

This is the very opposite of the circuitous journey of Ulysses, who returns from war to love, and of the poetical career of the Positive Romantic Friedrich Rückert, who was glad to quit the war poetry of his ardent youth and less ardent manhood for a mature and wiser poetry of love. “Nach dem verlor’nen DoppelEden Der Kindheit und der ersten Welt”, love makes us dream of the paradise that we have lost and that we will regain in the world beyond: Und nun von Liebe will ich singen, Die dieser Erde ödem Raum Wo nicht ein Paradies kann bringen, Doch eines Paradieses Traum.848

In Byron’s Negative Romantic view, conversely, men’s amorous and sympathetic feelings gradually harden with the approaching death of their hearts; their childish hopes of regaining an imagined paradise vanish with age and experience of the world and its ways.849 Scepticism will arise, informing them that such a paradise has never really existed and that the Fall of man is a mere fiction, a parabolic description of man’s foul nature. Wrinkles and grey hairs make it increasingly difficult to satisfy their remaining erotic desires and they will recur to other, far less positive pleasures including political ambition,850 financial speculation,851 and, above all, the joys of mutual hate, which last much longer than the joys of mutual love: “Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure”.852 Hatred also proves to be stronger than love in the case of Selim in The Bride of Abydos (1813), who is implored by his beloved Zuleika to renounce his plans of revenge for his love of her in unison with Byron’s consistent doubt of progress. 846 Byron, Stanzas Written on the Road between Florence and Pisa, line 3. 847 Ibid. lines 5–8. Note the past tense of stanzas 3 and 4. 848 Rückert, Rückblick auf die politischen Gedichte, lines 25–26 and 29–32, undated, in: Gesammelte poetische Werke, 12 vols., Frankfurt am Main 1868–1869, I. 279. 849 Gleckner, Byron and the Ruins of Paradise, 332–344. 850 Byron, Don Juan, 13. 5. 7–8 and 13. 6. 1–3. 851 Ibid. 12. 2. 7–8 and 13. 6. 4. 852 Ibid. 13. 6. 8.

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In its most destructive form, hatred manifests itself in war. The young Juan is a lover and soldier full of contradictory illusions of paradise and glory, whereas his older friend Johnson is a disillusioned realist, whose only remaining passion still to be gratified is that “for pence or praise”853 in his military career. Byron thus keeps the reader aware of the short-lived nature of Juan’s enviable success in matters of love, which will ebb and dwindle to nothing with his passing years and decaying beauty, unless the dangers inherent in love kill Juan, as they do Haid8e, in the bloom of his youth. The unreal idyll of Juan’s and Haid8e’s love is represented as unearthly, operating beyond the laws of time and space, only for the paradisiacal illusion to be shattered, calling the reader back to the contrast of the tough reality : Their faces were not made for wrinkles, their Pure blood to stagnate, their great hearts to fail; The blank grey was not made to blast their hair, But like the climes that know nor snow nor hail They were all summer : lightning might assail And shiver them to ashes, but to trail A long and snake-like life of dull decay Was not for them – they had too little clay.854

In a study of Byron’s imagery855 it has been demonstrated that clay or dust on the one hand and fire or flame on the other symbolize two irreconcilable and discordant components of man’s split nature – a view sharply opposed to Wordsworth and Platonism. Fire and flame represent all that aspires to eternity and infinitude: the passions of love and glory, and the desire for beauty. Clay and dust represent all that radically frustrates those airy aspirations, rendering them illusory by constraints of finitude and limitation: the decay of corporal existence, and the experience of deformity. Hence – as has been highlighted previously – Byron usually describes the passionate efforts of the mind or soul doomed to produce mere illusions in its bodily confinement with images of intolerable heat and unquenchable fever. It is the disease of all Byron’s heroes, like Manfred, who has lived too long “With the fierce thirst of death – and still unslaked!”856

853 Ibid. 5. 22. 8. Byron’s Conrad is also a typical example of how illogically the virtue of lawless erotic love may coexist with the vice of reckless war and bloodshed. 854 Byron, Don Juan, 4. 9. 1–8; cf. ibid. 4. 8. 1–8. Also cf. Byron, If Sometimes in the Haunts of Men, 14 March 1812, lines 39–40, on the death of his beloved and beautiful young choirboy John Edleston: Thou wert too like a dream of Heaven For earthly Love to merit thee. 855 Elledge, Byron and the Dynamics of Metaphor, Nashville TN 1968, 8. 856 Byron, Manfred, II/1, 48.

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That disharmonious conflict of the human soul with the human body forms indeed the central problem of Manfred:857 How beautiful is all this visible world! How glorious in its action and itself! But we, who name ourselves its sovereigns, we, Half dust, half deity, alike unfit To sink or soar, with our mix’d essence make A conflict of its elements, and breathe The breath of degradation and of pride, Contending with low wants and lofty will, Till our mortality predominates, […]858

Manfred, the Child of Dust and Earth with the high aspiring mind, who would rise above the order of his despised race,859 fails to find the oblivion that would make him forget his agonizing mortal condition.860 His extreme searches both above and below invariably relapse into an awareness of his human condition: “And was all clay again”.861 He realizes the truth so often formulated by Byron that, just as the sick heart’s death is the only cure for its sickness, so the sick soul’s only cure is the demolition of its fleshly prison: “Old man! ’tis not so difficult to die”.862 Another Child of Dust whose “aspirations Have been beyond the dwellers of the earth”863 is Rousseau, who appears in the third canto of Childe Harold’s 857 Armin Geraths, Lord Byron: Manfred, in: Das englische Drama, ed. Mehl, Düsseldorf 1970, II.131. 858 Byron, Manfred, I/2, 37–45. Moreover, Byron repeatedly stresses the disharmony of body and soul, in opposition to the Platonic jakoj!cah_a, maintaining that the mind may be great and aspiring in the most rotten and deformed body ; see Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 4. 20. 1–9, and The Deformed Transformed, I/1, 145–146 and 217–220 (with regard to Arnold and Socrates). 859 Pafford, Byron and the Mind of Man, 107: “[…]Manfred dramatizes the tragic dilemma of mind aspiring to complete independence but constrained by its fleshly condition within a deterministic universe.” 860 Byron, Manfred, II/4, 158–159: He is convulsed – This is to be a mortal And seek the things beyond mortality. 861 Ibid. II/2, 79. Note the rhetorical underscoring of Manfred’s disillusionment by repeated aposiopesis and interruption, throughout his dialogue with the Witch of the Alps. 862 Ibid. III/4, 151. Also cf. ibid. II/2, 172–176: […] we can number How few – how less than few – wherein the soul Forbears to pant for death, and yet draws back As from a stream in winter, though the chill Be but a moment’s. 863 Ibid. II/4, 58–59.

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Pilgrimage.864 That unusual man, “whose dust was once all fire”,865 a Byronic construction and Byronic recluse like all aspiring minds, differed from Manfred insofar as he was not aware of his mortal constraints and earthly condition. He lived in an illusory world of pure mind and soul, enamoured of an ideal beauty that was not real866 and set the world in flame with erring thoughts and impossible dreams of social equality.867 His “failure in all things” showed Byron the immovable limits of bodily mortality which weigh upon and oppress the soul that yearns for higher planes. Only physical death might give the soul the freedom to roam in endless regions congenial to its immortality as it gathers endless knowledge congenial to its infinity, “Eternal, boundless, undecay’d, A thought unseen, but seeing all”.868 But this speaker’s soul is imagined as a mere “nameless and eternal thing”869 in a godless universe of eternal matter. An early death is to be welcomed for its termination of an increasingly gloomy life of bodily bondage, but the life beyond is possibly a similar burden – an eternal and absurd circle of boredom in higher spheres void of the cardinal virtues of love and hope, not to mention faith, which is replaced by hate and fear. Hence, there is no real escape from the pain of existence, not even for the unbodied spirit: Above or Love, Hope, Hate, or Fear, It lives all passionless and pure: An age shall fleet like earthly year ; Its years as moments shall endure. Away, away, without a wing, O’er all, through all, its thought shall fly, A nameless and eternal thing, Forgetting what it was to die.870 864 865 866 867

Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 3. 76–81. Ibid. 3. 76. 4. Ibid. 3. 78–79. Ibid. 3. 77. 7 et 3. 81. 1–4. Note the comparison of Rousseau’s frenzied egalitarian philosophy (as basis of the French Revolution) to the false Pythian Oracle at Delphi, promising fair things but to lead to disillusion and destruction. Also see Blessington, Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. cit. 79: “‘Who can walk the earth, with eyes fixed on the heavens, without often stumbling over the hindrances that intercept the path? while those who are intent only on the beaten road escape. Such is the fate of men of genius: elevated over the herd of their fellow-men, with thoughts that soar above the sphere of their physical existence, no wonder that they stumble when treading the mazes of ordinary life, with irritated sensibility, and mistaken views of all the common occurrences they encounter.’” 868 Byron, Hebrew Melodies, When Coldness Wraps This Suffering Clay, 1815, lines 9–10, in: Complete Poetical Works, III. 302. 869 Ibid. line 31. 870 Ibid. lines 25–32. Also of Byron, Detached Thoughts, 96 (1821), ed. cit. IX. 45: “The Stoics – Epictetus & Marcus Aurelius, call the present state ‘a Soul which drags a Carcase’ – a heavy chain, to be sure; but chains, being material, may be shaken off.” Even though meant as a Modest Proposal for mad poets, “To die like Cato” held a certain fascination for Byron

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Byron ridiculed Plato’s soma-sema-doctrine which stated that souls, unconfined by their bodies, could unite in non-erotic and non-physical love. The deeper reason is now obvious, but the image of the soul yearning to break through its bodily confinement and finding its fulfilment in the hour of death, derived from Plato’s Phaidon, appealed to Byron through its openness to negative reinterpretation. So the emblem of the wild falcon vainly striving to rise with his clipped wings, as used in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,871 offered itself as a picture of man’s illusory passions. Man is a conflicting compound of “fiery dust”,872 the one part ascending, the other part bearing down into the earth. In the unreal idyll of their paradise of eternal summer, Juan and Haid8e have “too little clay” ever to be the victims of “dull decay”.873 However, with their reawakening the illusory dreams of immortality and lasting youth give way to the real facts of slowly approaching old age and death. The subversive idea behind this is the Negative Romantic concept of beauty as a mere delusion, invented by nature to deceive man as to the reality of death and decay – an idea which Klingemann’s Kreuzgang had already formulated in a pamphlet: Traut auch, ich bitte euch, dem Lebensschein und den Rosen auf den Wangen des Knaben nicht; das ist die Kunst der Natur, wodurch sie, gleich einem geschickten Arzt, den einbalsamierten Körper eine längere Zeit in einer angenehmen Täuschung erhält.874

Such disillusioned insight is tantamount to the death of the heart, which precedes that of the body, as Byron had sufficiently demonstrated in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and which is worse than physical death in the midst of illusory expectations of a terrestrial paradise. The premature demise of the young John

871

872

873 874

(Hints from Horace, lines 823–832), much as, in some recurring moods, he would have preferred not to have lived at all (Detached Thoughts, 95, ibid. IX. 45). Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 3. 15. 1–9: But in Man’s dwellings he [Childe Harold] became a thing Restless and worn, and stern and wearisome, Droop’d as a wild-born falcon with clipt wing, To whom the boundless air alone were home: Then came his fit again, which to o’ercome, As eagerly the barr’d-up bird will beat His breast and beak against his wiry dome Till the blood tinge his plumage, so the heat Of his impeded soul would through his bosom eat. Byron, Don Juan, 2. 212. 8. Also cf. Blessington, Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. cit. 68: “They who accuse Byron of being an unbeliever are wrong […] He is a sworn foe to Materialism, tracing every defect to which we are subject, to the infirmities entailed on us by the prison of clay [i. e. the mortal body] in which the heavenly spark [i. e. the immortal soul] is confined.” Byron, Don Juan, 4. 9. 7–8. Klingemann, Nachtwachen, ed. cit. 69.

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Edleston, the choirboy to whom Byron felt romantically attached during his Cambridge days and whose death he lamented in his Thyrza poems, involved at least one doubtful blessing: it withdrew the imperfections of change and decay on both sides of the grave from each other’s eyes and nourished the survival of an idealized, torturous affection.875 In that sense, John Edleston was happy to die before Byron in those better, illusory days when “love, however vain”,876 shone warmly and expectantly : I know not if I could have borne To see thy beauties fade; The night that followed such a morn Had worn a deeper shade: Thy day without a cloud hath passed, And thou wert lovely to the last; Extinguish’d, not decay’d; As stars that shoot along the sky Shine brightest as they fall from high.877

Similarly, Haid8e’s premature death may be envied rather than deplored as it spares her, and her lover, the torment of seeing her tender skin wrinkle and her glossy hair turn grey : She was not made Through years or moons the inner weight to bear, Which colder hearts endure till they are laid By age in earth; her days and pleasures were Brief, but delightful – such as had not stayed Long with her destiny ; but she sleeps well By the sea shore, whereon she loved to dwell.878 875 Byron, And Thou art Dead, as Young and Fair, lines 5–45. 876 Ibid. line 62. 877 Ibid. lines 46–54. Note again the submerged imagery of the phantom meteor’s fall to death, its final destination. 878 Byron, Don Juan, 4. 71. 2–8; cf. ibid. 4. 11. 1–8 and 4. 12. 1–8. Also cf. the narrator reflections on the advantages of Zuleika’s very similar premature death from grief in The Bride of Abydos, 2. 641–650: Ah ! happy ! but of life to lose the worst ! That grief – though deep – though fatal – was thy first ! Thrice happy […] and on the tomb of Cecilia Metella in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 4. 102. 1–6 : Perchance she died in youth : it may be, bowed With woes far heavier than the ponderous tomb That weighed upon her gentle dust, a cloud Might gather o’er her beauty, and a gloom In her dark eye, prophetic of the doom Heaven gives its favourites – early death […] Byron disconcerted and worried Lady Blessington with similar ideas, connecting the

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Ultimately, death appears as the only possible salvation from a life which can only be escaped below, because there is no Christian, Platonic, or Positive Romantic salvation above. Beddoes radicalized Byron’s pre-Decadent and prenihilist vision of the saving Nichts or grand n8ant in Death’s Jest-Book, where the young, fresh, beautiful Sibylla asks the ghost of her beloved and murdered Wolfram to take her into the peace of the grave gently, where the pains, disappointments, dangers, and vanities of earthly love can no longer haunt her. Wolfram, though reluctant, finally grants her disillusioned request: ’Tis better too To die, as thou art, young, in the first grace And full of beauty, and so be remembered As one chosen from the earth to be an angel; Not left to droop and wither, and be borne Down by the breath of time.879

Premature death also spares both Haid8e and Sibylla the sad disappointment of seeing their love grow into a dull habit.880 Apart from his deconstructing a favourite Romantic-Platonic image of the world’s ultimate reintegration, Byron’s scurrilous digressions on love and marriage must be seen in connection within this larger context.881 They bear the same relation to each other as wine and vinegar, the celestial and delicious wine being turned by time to “a sad, sour, sober beverage” with “a very homely household savour”.882 Byron’s narrator uses this as a comically disillusioned explication of the well-known fact that in medieval and Renaissance literature the adventures and sentiments of young lovers are rarely traced into their married lives: There’s doubtless something in domestic doings, Which forms, in fact, true love’s antithesis; Romances paint at full length people’s wooings, But only give a bust of marriages; For no one cares for matrimonial cooings, There’s nothing wrong in a connubial kiss:

879 880 881 882

boon of an early death with his view of life as a progressively destroyed texture of illusions (Blessington, Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. cit. 163): “‘People complain of the brevity of life, (said Byron,) should they not rather complain of its length, as its enjoyments cease long before the halfway-house of life is passed, unless one has the luck to die young, ere the illusions that render existence supportable have faded away, and are replaced by experience, that dull monitress, that ever comes too late? While youth steers the bark of life, and passion impells her on, experience keeps aloof; but when youth and passion are fled, and that we no longer require her aid, she comes to reproach us with the past, to disgust us with the future.’” Beddoes, Death’s Jest-Book, IV/2, 116–121, in: Plays and Poems, ed. cit. 293. Byron, Don Juan, 4. 16. 1–8. Ibid. 3. 5–10. Ibid. 3. 5. 6 and 8. Also cf. Byron, The Waltz, lines 93–104.

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Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife, He would have written sonnets all his life?883

The marriage stanzas in the English cantos of Don Juan take a similarly satirical view of the holy state of matrimony, debasing it to a marketable commodity and social institution that is totally inefficient at regulating public morality or Malthusian or Rappian birth control.884 Inscribing himself upon Byron’s Don Juan, Clare’s satirical Don Juan: A Poem (MS 1841) radicalized Byron’s subversively secular view of the holy state of matrimony, degrading it to a Poesque hoax and proof of the proverb that the road to ruin is paved with good intentions (as in the marriage vows). To support his view, Clare’s narrator refers to his own disillusioning life experience to justify his broad anti-feminist satire in the line of the Classical Tradition from Juvenal via Boileau to Byron: Marriage is nothing but a driveling hoax To please old codgers when they’re turned of forty I wed & left my wife like other folks But not untill I found her false & faulty O woman fair – the man must pay thy jokes Such makes a husband very often naughty Who falls in love will seek his own undoing The road to marriage is – ‘the road to ruin’.885

That disillusioning view of love and marriage was repeated by the sceptical and experienced narrator of Pushkin’s Evgeny Onegin, who satirically comments on the young Romantic Platonist Lensky’s na"ve thoughtlessness with regard to his later married life with Olga,886 followed by Byronic reflections on the happiness of dying young, in an illusion untarnished by the experience of life.887 Instead of healing and reconciling in a foretaste of paradise, love destroys Lensky’s life and Onegin’s happiness. Inspired by Byron and Pushkin, Lermontov, in his poem “?`QbV^YV” (MS 1830), expressed his “fear” that love is a destructive fantasy and, if materialized from dream to reality, ends in frustration rather than re883 Byron, Don Juan, 3. 8. 1–8. Byron, The Prophecy of Dante, 1821, contrasts Dante’s unfortunate later marriage against his early love of young Beatrice, as reality against illusion. Cf. Byron’s later skit on the anniversary of his wedding-day (MS 1820): Here’s a happy new year! But with reason I beg you’ll permit me to say – Wish me many returns of the season, But as few as you please of the day. 884 Byron, Don Juan, 15. 35–61. 885 Clare, Don Juan: A Poem, lines 25–32, in: Later Poems 1837–1864, ed. cit. 90. 886 Pushkin, Evgeny Onegin, 1825–1833, chapter 4, stanza 50, transl. cit. 98. 887 Ibid. chapter 6, stanza 39, transl. cit. 138–139.

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generation, with memories of a lost youth and the sobering view of an old woman seated in an armchair.888 And Verlaine concluded his early collection of saturnine poems, FÞtes galantes (1869), inspired by a subversive reading of Watteau’s histrionic rococo paintings, with a verse dialogue between two lonely former lovers reduced to mere spectres walking in a wintry park, “Colloque sentimental”. Contrary to the Wordsworthian doctrine, the evocation of the past does not reanimate their worn-out love. Their hope of a splendid future has died and a black sky has come to replace a warm, blue one: – Qu’il 8tait bleu, le ciel, et grand, l’espoir! – L’espoir a fui, vaincu, vers le ciel noir.889

This multiple manifestation of love’s vanity within the inviolable limits of bodily existence and cause of man’s disillusionment conducive to his heart’s death is given exhaustive treatment in the Egeria stanzas of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.890 In Positive Romantic poetology, nymphs were beautiful female nature-goddesses whom creative men yearned for – Fernidole and princesses lointaines being mythical muses that inspired the prophet-poet as a priestly nympholept poised between heaven and earth. The would-be romantic dreamer and must-be realist Byron suspected that Egeria, the legendary nymph beloved by the legendary Roman King Numa Pompilius, was a mythical creature of the fancy, conceived by a mortal and real man in search of immortal and ideal beauty.891 Whether this mortal imagined her nympholeptically in his terrestrial despair892 or deified a charming woman of this world euhemeristically,893 Egeria is no more than “a beautiful thought […] softly bodied forth”,894 unmasking the Positive Romantic myth (or mendacious pretence) of divine inspiration, prophet-poetry, and spontaneous overflow. Only thus can she be immortal and remain unwrinkled with years like the face of her cave-guarded spring.895 Only thus could love keep its earliest promise to man, maintain his original ecstasy, and spare his soul “the dull satiety which all destroys”.896 But, as things are, this paradise is an unattainable ideal897 and its celestial fruit is forbidden.898 Whoever tastes of love, 888 Lermontov, ?`QbV^YV (posth. 1889), in: Gedichte, 14. 889 Verlaine, FÞtes galantes, Colloque sentimental, 1869, lines 13–14, in Œuvres po8tiques complHtes, 121. 890 Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 4. 115–126. 891 Ibid. 4. 115. 1–3. 892 Ibid. 4. 115. 3–5. 893 Ibid. 4. 115. 6–8. 894 Ibid. 4. 115. 9. 895 Ibid. 4. 116. 2–3. 896 Ibid. 4. 119. 8. 897 Ibid. 4. 122. 7. Throughout the twelve Egeria-stanzas, Byron contrasts the paradise of the fancy against the desert or wilderness of the real world. 898 Ibid. 4. 120. 9.

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that tempting but poisonous apple on the Tree of Life, Byron slyly insinuates, brings death upon himself as, in biblical mythology, Eve brought death upon mankind. The adoring young lover falls sick, his diseased soul made feverish by false celestial creation, his alchemical fantasy vainly trying to turn the base metal of this world into the precious gold of Paradise, stubbornly refusing to admit that death is the only cure for his raving malady :899 Who loves, raves – ’tis youth’s frenzy – but the cure Is bitterer still, as charm by charm unwinds Which robed our idols, and we see too sure Nor worth nor beauty dwells from out the mind’s Ideal shape of such; yet still it binds The fatal spell, and still it draws us on, Reaping the whirlwind from the oft-sown winds; The stubborn heart, its alchemy begun, Seems ever near the prize – wealthiest when most undone.900

Love, holy love, thus idolized in sick man’s raving brain, was the earliest oracle,901 an idea suggested by Egeria’s enchanted cave, implying that – as usual in classical mythology – the enticing deceit of such divine prophecies only served to drive the victim faster to his destruction. Although our first experience should teach us that love’s myths are unreal and love’s oracles false, we linger on, believing in love, votaries, and martyrs of a vain faith until, with disillusion heaped upon disillusion, our hearts break with our feverish souls’ sterilizing disease: Oh Love! no habitant of earth thou art – An unseen seraph, we believe in thee, A faith whose martyrs are the broken heart, But never yet hath seen, nor e’er shall see The naked eye, thy form, as it should be; The mind hath made thee, as it peopled heaven, Even with its own desiring phantasy, And to a thought such shape and image given, As haunts the unquench’d soul – parch’d – wearied – wrung – and riven.902

899 Note the accumulation of words denoting disease and death in all twelve stanzas. In stanza 126, the last and strongest of the number, the aforementioned Tree of Life appears as a “boundless upas” and “all-blasting tree” whose leaves and branches are the “skies which rain their plagues on men like dew”, an inversion of the biblical dews of Heaven. 900 Ibid. 4. 123. 1–9. 901 Ibid. 4. 118. 9. 902 Ibid. 4. 121. 1–9. Note the inversions of the Christian creed as well as of biblical imagery, the sacrifice of the broken heart (Psalm 51, 17) and the panting and thirsting of the soul for God (Psalm 42, 1–2).

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Byron found another idolized creation of man’s desiring fantasy, resembling Egeria in her dangerous delusiveness, in the immortal and unearthly beauty of the Venus of the Medici in Florence. In those stanzas of the same fourth canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in which he covertly disavows Keats’s view of art’s reality903 Byron’s speaker loses himself with seeming ecstasy in a drunk and dazzled contemplation of that captivating work of art, and, as usual, abruptly awakens from his seraphic dream of romantic illusion to the bitter bleakness of mortal reality : “[…] but the weight Of earth recoils upon us: – let it go!”904 Another illusion gone, another act of faith destroyed, another step taken down the road to the vain martyrdom of love. Again, beauty has proved to be a mirage rather than a symbol of truth.905 Later, Thomas Hardy would extend this view of man’s self-delusion from myth and religion to the experience of life. Hardy’s characters tend to fall in love not with a real human being but with an ideal projected onto reality, with the inevitable consequence of bitter disillusion. His tale The Pursuit of the WellBeloved (1892) as well as his poem “The Well-Beloved” show men whose sexual promiscuity is due to their deification of rather earthly women, so that every disillusion leads to another deification: “men’s idolatries”.906 One of the interim idols, who cruelly makes the unhappy speaker fall in love with her, reveals her knowledge of man’s desiring fantasy : ‘O fatuous man, this truth infer, Brides are not what they seem; Thou lovest what thou dreamest her ; I am thy very dream!’907

As a consequence of this chance meeting, the speaker’s attitude has completely changed when he finally meets his longed-for bride, whom he had construed

903 Ibid. 4. 48–52. Note the close imitation of Keats’s style, his synesthesia (“ambrosial aspect”), his paradox (“the Goddess loves in stone”), his gemination (“there – for ever there”), his sensuous ecstasy of united pleasure and pain (“We gaze and turn away, and know not where, Dazzled and drunk with beauty, till the heart Reels with its fulness”), and his luxuriously erotic images (“thy lips are With lava kisses melting while they burn, Shower’d on his eyelids, brow, and mouth, as from an urn”). 904 Ibid. 4. 52. 5–6. 905 The “truth and beauty” of the Venuses of Titian and Giorgione, which Byron evoked in Beppo (12. 1), is yet another instance of an illusion soon destroyed. Against the background of the Venetian Carnival, itself a symbol of perverted values and disguised truth, Beppo reveals the reality of illusion and deception hidden behind the artistic splendour of “Italian beauty” and “the land which still is Paradise” (46. 1–2), much as Don Juan reveals the reality of illusion and deception hidden behind the beauty and piety of Spain. 906 Hardy, The Well-Beloved, line 24, in: Complete Poems, 133. 907 Ibid. lines 49–52, ed. cit. 134.

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into “the God-created norm Of perfect womankind”. Her beauty and his joy evaporate, giving way to deepest depression: When I arrived and met my bride Her look was pinched and thin, As if her soul had shrunk and died, And left a waste within.908

This implies a profound doubt of the Positive Romantic concept of the relationship between art and life. In Keats’s aesthetic philosophy as expressed in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “To Autumn” (both 1819), art fixes a passing moment of real life at its highest point of beauty, ecstasy, and fullness, before its unavoidable decline, “post coitum homo tristis”. In the poetry and poetology of Byron, Hardy, or indeed Rückert’s Amaryllis, art produces illusions that art itself should expose as such. This aspect of the vanity of love, in life as well as art, involves a theme that perpetually recurs in Byron’s and Hardy’s works: love’s inconstancy. With respect to women, Byron’s persuasion of their inconstancy need not surprise us, being an echo of his earliest experiences. The illogical split between the allure of romance and the dictates of reality – the reluctance but need to quit the realm of golden dreams for that of truth – had as early as Hours of Idleness associated the faithfulness of a fair smiling woman with the boundless but deceitful reign of fancy of which, in “To Romance”, the disillusioned speaker takes a pathetic short-lived farewell: And yet – ’tis hard to quit the dreams Which haunt the unsuspicious soul, Where every nymph a goddess seems, Whose eyes through rays immortal roll; While Fancy holds her boundless reign, And all assume a varied hue; When virgins seem no longer vain, And even woman’s smiles are true.909

But, just as the femme fatale and homme fatal are aspects of the divinely decreed danger of love, woman’s inconstancy finds its counterpart in man’s inconstancy

908 Ibid. lines 65–68, ed. cit. 135. 909 Byron, Hours of Idleness, To Romance, 1807, lines 9–16. Also cf. Byron, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, line 78, “Believe a woman or an epitaph”, and Hints from Horace, lines 689–696, where the speaker compares the inconstancy and faithlessness of the Muse to the same characteristics of women in general. There is a revealing contrast between young Southey’s Positive Romantic and young Byron’s Negative Romantic poems on romance, analysed in Labbe, Romantic Paradox, 11–12 and 135.

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as parallel manifestations of love’s divinely decreed vanity. True lasting love and attachment are a matter of “golden dreams, Romance”: And must we own thee, but a name, And from thy hall of clouds descend? Nor find a Sylph in every dame, A Pylades in every friend? But leave, at once, thy realms of air To mingling bands of fairy elves; Confess that Woman’s false as fair, And friends have feeling for – themselves910

Sardanapalus is unfaithful to his wife, the sister of Salemenes, being too much attracted to the fair boys and girls of his court, and his justification of his conduct in response to Salemenes’ reproaches sets out from the principle that he only obeys the laws of human nature: I married her as monarchs wed – for state, And loved her as most husbands love their wives. If she or thou supposedst I could link me Like a Chaldean peasant to his mate, Ye knew nor me, nor monarchs, nor mankind.911

True love is but a momentary “fever which precedes the languid rout Of our sensations”,912 and the loving of faithful pairs, we have seen, is a mere pretence.913 “[…] how the devil is it that fresh features Have such a charm for us poor human creatures?”,914 the narrator asks, seemingly perplexed about the fact that Juan completely forgets Julia at sight of the beautiful Haid8e: I hate inconstancy – I loathe, detest, Abhor, condemn, abjure the mortal made Of such quicksilver clay that in his breast No permanent foundation can be laid; Love, constant love, has been my constant guest, And yet last night, being at a masquerade, I saw the prettiest creature, fresh from Milan, Which gave me some sensations like a villain.915 910 Byron, To Romance, lines 17–24. Note the symmetry of lines 19–20 with lines 23–24, in connection with Byron’s growing distrust of his erotic love of woman and man. Cf. Byron’s commentary on true attachments as existing in the imagination of poets alone, in: Complete Poetical Works, ed.cit. I. 373. 911 Byron, Sardanapalus, 1/2, 213–217. 912 Byron, Don Juan, 9. 75. 6–7. 913 Ibid. 9. 74. 2–8. 914 Ibid. 2. 208. 7–8. 915 Ibid. 2. 209. 1–8.

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Inconstancy is an inalienable component of love and is consequently as uncontrollable as love itself. Inconstancy will have its way whether one likes it or not, and no rational argument can check its course. The narrator illustrates this by continuing the digression in his usual ironical manner : But soon Philosophy came to my aid And whisper’d ‘think of every sacred tie!’ ‘I will, my dear Philosophy,’ I said, ‘But then her teeth, and then, Oh heaven! her eye! I’ll just inquire if she be wife or maid, Or neither – out of curiosity.’ ‘Stop!’ cried Philosophy, with an air so Grecian, (Though she was masked then as a fair Venetian). ‘Stop!’ so I stopp’d.916

The philosophy which comes to his aid and suppresses the symptoms of his inconstancy is not rational argument but his jealous female companion demanding her due. Nor can one extenuate this natural ingredient of love by any kind of Platonic sublimation and explain it away as “A fine extension of the faculties, […] Drawn from the stars, and filtered through the skies”917. Like love itself from which it is inseparable, it is a primarily erotic power calling for physical satisfaction: In short, it is the use of our own eyes, With one or two small senses added, just To hint that flesh is form’d of fiery dust.918

Even after Juan’s tragic love affair with Haid8e, when the reader least expects that he would break his solemn vows of constancy, the heroically resolved Juan is shown to yield to as trite a motive as the tears of the beautiful Gulbeyaz: Juan was moved: he had made up his mind To be impaled, or quarter’d as a dish For dogs, or to be slain with pangs refined, Or thrown to lions, or made baits for fish, 916 Ibid. 2. 210. 1–8 and 2. 211. 1. 917 Ibid. 2. 212. 2–4. Also cf. Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 1. 83. 1–5 : Yet to the beauteous form he was not blind, Though now it mov’d him as it moves the wise: Not that Philosophy on such a mind E’er deigned to bend her chastely-awful eyes: But Passion raves herself to rest, or flies. 918 Byron, Don Juan, 2. 212. 6–8. McGann’s study of Byron’s poetic development, Fiery Dust, takes its title from this significant passage. For the symbolism of fire and dust in Byron’s poetry see above.

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And thus heroically stood resign’d, Rather than sin – except to his own wish: But all his great preparatives for dying Dissolved like snow before a woman crying. As through his palms Bob Acres’ valour oozed, So Juan’s virtue ebb’d, I know not how ; And first he wonder’d why he had refused; And then, if matters could be made up now ; And next his savage virtue he accused, Just as a friar may accuse his vow, Or as a dame repents her of her oath, Which mostly ends in some small breach of both.919

Triteness is another aspect which, in Don Juan, unmasks love’s profound vanity. Traditional literature showed only half the truth, telling outright lies when it idealized love and represented it as an ever-burning passion, outliving even the lovers themselves and eternalizing their memory. Byron, who always intended to disavow the Platonic doctrines of Positive Romanticism, was naturally anxious to stress the ephemeral nature of love and, additionally, stress its corporeality and materiality in opposition to the tradition concept of heavenly and angelical love. This is the true aim and purpose of Byron’s digressions about love’s dependence on food and physical health. Juan’s resolution to remain faithful to Julia in his banishment is firm and seemingly unshakeable, but it barely survives as trite a thing as seasickness: Love’s a capricious power ; I’ve known it hold Out through a fever caused by its own heat, But be much puzzled by a cough and cold And find a quinsy very hard to treat; Against all noble maladies he’s bold, But vulgar illnesses don’t like to meet, Nor that a sneeze should interrupt his sigh, Nor inflammations redden his blind eye. But worst of all is nausea, or a pain, About the lower region of the bowels; 919 Byron, Don Juan, 5. 141–142. This is also another instance of Byron’s view of the dangers emanating from women and love in general; cf. e. g. his lines on the all-powerful seductive strength of female tears in The Corsair, 2. 543–554: Oh! too convincing – dangerously dear – In woman’s eye the unanswerable tear! That weapon of her weakness she can wield, To save, subdue – at once her spear and shield: Avoid it […]

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Love, who heroically breathes a vein, Shrinks from the application of hot towels, And purgatives are dangerous to his reign, Sea-sickness death; […].920

The idea of the corporeality of love is most prominent in the Haid8e episode, obviously in order to provide the necessary counterpoise to the paradisiacal illusion. Here lies the chief function of Haid8e’s maid Zoe, a character often compared to Shakespeare’s Nurse in Romeo and Juliet. Though Byron almost certainly misread Romeo and Juliet as the tragedy of two innocent young lovers, it must be kept in mind that Shakespeare’s dramatic aim was totally different from that of Byron’s epic poem. Shakespeare’s Nurse, though like Zoe a comic go-between, emphasizes the sinfulness of the primarily erotic lovers,921 whereas Byron did not recognize the existence of any form of primarily ideal love and discerned no sin in the frank sexuality of Juan and Haid8e. Zoe serves as a cook to the young lovers, acting her part as go-between by keeping their love alive with coffee and fried eggs, aware “that the best feelings must have victual”922. Love is erotic and not ideal, earthly and not paradisiacal, and hence it “must be sustained like flesh and blood”:923 For health and idleness to passion’s flame Are oil and gunpowder ; and some good lessons Are also learnt from Ceres and from Bacchus, Without whom Venus will not long attack us. While Venus fills the heart (without heart really Love, though good always, is not quite so good) Ceres presents a plate of vermicelli, – For love must be sustain’d like flesh and blood, – While Bacchus pours out wine, or hands a jelly ; Eggs, oysters too, are amatory food; But who is their purveyor from above Heaven knows, – it may be Neptune, Pan, or Jove.924

Whatever is earthly and corporeal is necessarily subject to habituation and decay. Whatever tempts us with novelty, beauty, and ideal perfection is an illusory varnish hiding the reality of boredom, ugliness, and ruin. Childe Harold is a satiated lover at the very beginning of Byron’s epic, fallen from illusions of 920 921 922 923 924

Byron, Don Juan, 2. 22. 1–8 and 2. 23. 1–6. Franklin Miller Dickey, Not Wisely but too Well, San Marino CA 1957, 63–117. Byron, Don Juan, 2. 145. 1. Ibid. 2. 170. 4. Ibid. 2. 169. 5–8 and 2. 170. 1–8. The reference is to a popular Latin quotation from Terence, “Sine Cerere et Libero friget Venus”.

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Paradise into the boredom of Paradise Lost. In Leopardi’s poems and prose, man must merely scratch “la gioia” in order to find the hidden core of “la noia”, “l’ennui” – earth’s and man’s reality. The speaker of Heine’s poem “Götterdämmerung” sees through the false varnish of the joyous month of May and finds only […] das Grausen, Das mit dem freudgen Grüne zu bedecken Der Mai vergeblich strebt.925

Like Byron’s Childe Harold, Heine’s Tannhäuser grows weary of Venus after spending years in Venusberg. His time of repentance in Rome makes him long for his lost paradise, but on his return he finds that it is not to be regained. Domestic boredom has replaced the joys of love forever : Der Ritter legte sich ins Bett, Er hat kein Wort gesprochen. Frau Venus in die Küche ging, Um ihm eine Suppe zu kochen.926

The critical discourse on love and marriage in nineteenth-century literature which subverted Positive Romantic imagery and appeared as early as Klingemann’s Nachtwachen (1804–1805) may be read in this larger context of Romantic Disillusionism. Klingemann’s Kreuzgang ridicules “Ehehälfte”, the Platonic half which has found its complement to wholeness, as a blessing only insofar as the ordeal, which marriage must produce in the course of time, is halved.927 Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, bored by the plateau of both her conventional marriage and her provincial landscape in Normandy, expects to find excitement in both adultery and town life. A short time of exposure teaches her that prolonged adultery is no better than marriage, and prolonged town life no better than provincial life. Beauty and novelty are then ignes fatui, love is vain, and the ultimate reality of “l’ennui” is inescapable. “Les souillures du mariage” are followed by “la d8sillusion de l’adultHre”.928 Suicide is the price she pays for following an illusion of lasting love. The novel’s province becomes a chiffre for the disillusioned drabness and tedium of human life in general. Flaubert’s Madame Bovary was published in the same year as Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal. This contained the most radical, pre-modern formulation of the vanity of love, in the context of the poet’s view of nature’s baseness and de925 926 927 928

Heine, Götterdämmerung, 1823–1824, lines 43–45, in: Sämtliche Schriften, I. 151. Heine, Der Tannhäuser, 1836, lines 157–160, ed. cit. IV. 353. Klingemann, Nachtwachen, 26. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 1857, in: Œuvres, ed. A. Thibaudet – R. Dumesnil, BibliothHque de la Pl8iade, Paris 1951–1952, I. 497.

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formity. Byron and Heine had still viewed erotic love as a real, though short-lived and dangerous, pleasure and an effective anodyne for man’s painful consciousness of the futility of life. The Marquis de Sade had praised unrestrained erotic love as man’s logical response to his sadistic creator – if the creator of the world was not a myth – in obedience to eternal nature’s irresistible urge for pleasure as the ultimate end of life, taught by his favourite book of materialist philosophy, the Baron d’Holbach’s SystHme de la nature (1770), and had deprived love of all Platonic and Christian idealism. The determinism of attraction and repulsion replaced the illusions of a reintegration of the world as well as man’s free will and moral choice. In de Sade’s chief work of philosophy, Dialogue entre un prÞtre et un moribond (MS 1782), the dying materialist sees erotic satisfaction as the utmost joy to be obtained in this life, like Byron’s Sardanapalus and Büchner’s Valerio, and will expire in the arms of six women ordered and paid for that purpose, the priest becoming his convert and following his example: ‘[…] la volupt8 fut toujours le plus cher de mes biens; je l’ai encens8e toute ma vie, et j’ai voulu la terminer dans ses bras dans ce cabinet voisin: ma fin approche, six femmes plus belles que le jour sont dans ce cabinet voisin, je les r8servais pour ce moment-ci […]’929

In the immoral tales of his Champavert (1833), de Sade’s follower Borel chimed in with this view, advocated by the young student Passereau in his dialogues with his more conservative fellow student Albert. A tragi-comic version of the Byronic hero, Passereau advises Albert not to waste his energy in vain attempts at understanding the truth below the surface of life, but rather to enjoy life in wine, women, and laughter. Passereau’s scepticism here closely resembles Byron’s and Büchner’s, in a kind of Pyrrhonian ataraxia: ‘Tu seras toujours un bien malheureux sire, si tu ne veux jamais t’arrÞter aux superficies; si tu veux toujours creuser et fouiller. Les excavations de la pens8e et de la raison sont funestes, elles sont toujours suivies d’8boulement. On ne peut vivre et penser, il faut renoncer / l’un ou / l’autre. […] Il faut s’arranger de maniHre / ce que tout passe sur soi comme sur une cuirasse. Il faut prendre tout gaiement, il faut rire.’930

Drawing an inverse conclusion from Byron and de Sade, Baudelaire represented nature as a thing to be despised and eschewed rather than enjoyed.931 Created by a malign spirit and corrupted from the beginning, nature appears as ever putrid, ever rotting, ever ugly, and ever sterile. Baudelaire’s anti-feminism was first and foremost enmity to nature, traditionally allegorized as “mother nature”. His 929 De Sade, Dialogue entre un prÞtre et un moribond, in: Œuvres, ed. cit. I. 11. 930 Borel, Champavert ou contes immoraux, Passereau, l’8tudiant, 1833, Paris 2002, 187–188. 931 Gnüg, Kult der Kälte, passim.

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poem “Une charogne”, which may be read as a complementary work to “Un Voyage / CythHre”, again describes a rotting carcass in the most revolting terms. Comparing it to a libidinous woman with her legs stretched out into the air, the poem evokes a disgusting association of fertility in order to destroy it again. This technique of disillusionment is literally repeated ad nauseam, even into the poem’s smallest units such as adjective-noun-combinations (“ventre plein d’exhalaisons”) and rhymes (“.me” – “inf.me”). As “nature” rhymes with “pourriture” and “ordure”, this woman is a sterile prostitute. No fertile spoil for the sun’s penetrating rays, the woman’s womb produces nothing but evil smells as the carcass produces nothing but maggots, hundredfold (“au centuple”). Fertility is ultimately negative, destructive. The richness and store of harvest, as evoked in numerous Positive Romantic poems such as Keats’s ode “To Autumn” (1819), turns rotten, devoured by carrion flies and beasts of prey. The concluding address to the speaker’s love perverts the traditions of Marian hymns, troubadour lyrics, and Baroque seduction poems: “memento mori!” It reminds that “reine des gr.ces” of its unavoidable death and corruption, but instead of adoring a donna angelicata or asking a beautiful woman to be penetrated by the speaker before being penetrated by the worms, it spurns both physical beauty and carnal pleasure and jumps directly into the grave. Again, it is the disillusioned Romantic poet’s task to impose impeccable form upon chaotic nature, inverting Positive Romanticism by ranking art above nature, the dandy above “das Ewig Weibliche”, in pre-emption of Decadent aestheticism. Erotic loves are rotten loves: Alors, i ma beaut8! dites / la vermine Qui vous mangera de baisers, Que j’ai gard8 la forme et l’essence divine Des mes amours d8compos8s!932

D.G. Rossetti’s sequence of ballads and sonnets, The House of Life (1870, 1881), while being very different in tone and literary character, owes much more to Byron and Baudelaire than to Dante’s Vita Nuova, the work it sets out to pervert both in form and content. The sequence tells the story of a love lost to death (possibly Rossetti’s wife Elizabeth Siddal Rossetti) followed by the pursuit of a new love (possibly Jane Burden Morris). Like many of the individual sonnets themselves, the whole sequence of (ultimately 101) sonnets begins with the false Romantic-Platonic adoration of the divinity of love (“Love Enthroned”) and a false vision of the birth of love as the world’s saviour and reintegrator (“Bridal Birth”), ending in total disillusion (“Newborn Death”). Amor, both Love and New Love, is sadistic, causing the speaker’s slow, Decadent disintegration rather 932 Baudelaire, Les fleurs du mal, Une charogne, lines 45–48, in: Œuvres complHtes, 31.

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than a Platonic reintegration. Instead of expectations of eternity, the pained speaker experiences short-lived ecstasies, unceasing change, and fuga temporis. Eros, beauty and art prove to be constantly evasive ignes fatui, as expressed in the oxymora of the famous sonnet on the sonnet, “a moment’s monument”,933 ideals punctured by reality. Uncertainty and fear increasingly paralyse the yearning and rebelling speaker’s resistance. To him, the wings of love prove neither those of Keats’s nightingale nor Percy Shelley’s skylark that unite this world and the one beyond, but rather those of Icarus, doomed to crash-land. Fallen from their height of expectation, the exhausted lovers lie on the ground and stare into an empty sky : What of that hour at last, when for her sake No wing may fly to me nor song may flow ; When, wandering round my life unleaved, I know The bloodied feathers scattered in the brake, And think how she, far from me, with like eyes Sees through the untuneful bough the wingless skies?934

Love’s illusioriness and vanity proves its fatality, destructive of men as well as love’s necessary votaries: “Sweet Love, – but oh! most dread Desire of Love Lifethwarted”.935 The marked imagery of lovers’ irons, gyves, shackles, and chains suggests a succession of loves as linked in a chain or a round. Once one love is lost and cast off, another follows, equally lost and cast off. Amor, the sadistic God, does not care about loves lost by death or disappointment and will not even cast one look behind “Where night-rack shrouds the Old Love fugitive”:936 There is a change in every hour’s recall, And the last cowslip in the fields we see On the same day with the first corn-poppy. Alas for hourly change! Alas for all The loves that from his hand proud Youth lets fall, Even as the beads of a told rosary!937

933 D.G. Rossetti, The House of Life, [Sonnet on the Sonnet], 1881, line 1, in: Collected Poetry and Prose, 127. 934 D.G. Rossetti, The House of Life, Winged Hours, 1870, lines 9–14, ed. cit. 138–139. 935 Ibid. Love’s Fatality, lines 1–2, ed. cit. 151. 936 Ibid. Pride of Youth, line 8, ed. cit. 138. 937 Ibid. lines 9–14. Note the deterioration of holy cowslips (St Peter’s flowers) by poppies (short life, drugs, and death), and the dissolution of the rosary (eternity).

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The Vanity of the Passions

The Vanity of Glory

When Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley, Byron, and Polidori met in Switzerland in 1816, discussing, writing, travelling, and experiencing the sublimity of the Swiss Alps, the vanity of military glory may well have been a subject of conversation, considering Napoleon’s past wars and ultimate fall at Leipzig and Waterloo. Subsequent literary works written by members of the group often revolve round the theme. Polidori’s Ernestus Berchtold’s Swiss patriotism against Napoleon’s invasion is inflamed by his beloved Louisa, a misguided idealist and unwilling femme fatale destined to wreak his destruction. His initial idealism must repeatedly give way to the experience that Swiss fight Swiss and French fight French in aimless and pointless military actions, where all are ruthless and none can win. In Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), Adrian and Raymond take part in the War of Greek Independence, one that still rages, undecided, for more than a century. Adrian (Percy Shelley), the idealist, fails in both his humanitarian efforts to try to save a girl from being raped by Christian (not Turkish) soldiers and in his Hegelian expectations of history overcoming war. The Romantic genius and leader reaches the bitter pre-Modern experience that every wellmeaning individual is overrun by the brutal masses, and returns wounded. Raymond (Byron), by contrast, who fights for his own reputation rather than a nation’s cause, proves his view of all soldiers in all wars following nothing but their animal instincts to be right. All dreams of glory and paradise turn out to have been in vain. Grillparzer’s Der Traum ein Leben (MS 1817–1834, 1840) inverts the title and message of Calderjn de la Barca’s Baroque drama La vida es sueÇo (1636), Das Leben ein Traum, insofar as life is not represented as a dream projection of the reality of the world beyond, but as a brutal and unimprovable reality that broken dreams of glory and power must make us accept. Platonic metaphysics is thus discredited: reality is on this side of the grave only. Dissatisfied with his narrow and boring life with his betrothed Mirza and her father Masud in an Usbek village, Rustan, a typically Byronic split character, listens to a street singer that makes him dream of immortal love and glory. His very un-Platonic dream deceives and disarms him with initial successes, not least due to his murder of the king of Samarkand, culminating in his usurpation of the throne. His tyrant’s plots are revealed, however, and his beloved Gülnare forsakes him; his sweet dream turns into a nightmare of overthrow from which he wakes, falling back into the very narrow and boring reality from which he had tried to escape neither a wiser nor better man. He is not a homiletic model of resigned Biedermeier retirement to domestic happiness but a comic Napoleon, whom the genre of the dramatic fairy tale allows to survive in a broken, happy end, at least for a time. Rustan does not retire out of a philosophical insight, but because his dreams of

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glory have ended in a disaster.938 Like Napoleon, he is forced to take flight. The warlike and criminal component in Rustan’s mixed nature, intensified in his dream, will again break forth and swamp his domestic retirement, just as the defeated Napoleon’s retirement to Elba only preceded the outbreak of new wars. At the play’s end the infernal Zanga, who had awakened Rustan’s self-destructive passion for war, is dismissed together with the old sage Dervish, who had called Rustan to domestic contentment. Rustan merely repeats old Masud’s wise words just as he had merely repeated the Dervish’s wise words on the vanity of human wishes in the first act: ‘Schatten sind des Lebens Güter, Schatten seiner Freuden Schar, Schatten Worte, Wünsche, Taten; Die Gedanken nur sind wahr.’939

The spectacle of the rise and fall of Napoleon demonstrated to all of Europe how vain and deceptive a bubble military glory could be. This was especially true in France, after Waterloo and St Helena, where the splendid parades, proud decorations, and glittering uniforms were gone, but the blood and mutilations of war remained as a final reality. In his self-lacerating Confession d’un enfant du siHcle (1836), Musset’s Octave, fallen out of dreams of lasting, paradisiacal love, describes this contrast and cruel awakening of a nation, with a young generation of Byronic sceptics weakened and diseased by disillusionment. The self-fashioning imagery of the later Fin de SiHcle was here invented: sunset, twilight, horror and beauty, languor and sickness and ensuing death are all not only the plight of an individual writing his Romantic confessions but are also le mal du siHcle.940 The final two acts of Grabbe’s Napoleon oder Die hundert Tage (1831) teem with scenes of battle, as do Shakespeare’s history plays, but there is not a single scene in which a commander can control the battle. The most capable military leaders – Napoleon, Wellington, and Blücher – are doomed to fail, and so are Grabbe’s (as distinct from Nietzsche’s) “supermen”. War thus reveals the irredeemable primeval chaos of life. Ultimately, man’s relation to man is homo homini lupus, as in Byron’s successful Gothic drama Werner (1822), set at the close of the Thirty Years War in Germany where the end of open warfare is not peace but general confusion, plunder, and secret murder in a world characterized as a snake pit, wolves’ den, and spider web throughout the play. The ill938 Ian Frank Roe, Franz Grillparzer : A Century of Criticism, Columbia SC 1995, 69–70. 939 Grillparzer, Der Traum ein Leben: Dramatisches Märchen in vier Aufzügen, 1840, end of act 1, in: Werke, ed. cit. I. 630. 940 Musset, Confession d’un enfant du siHcle, 1836, part 1, chapter 2, in: Œuvres complHtes en prose, ed. cit. 65–79.

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starred military leaders, Tilly and Wallenstein, find their rest in death; not so the survivors, Werner and Ulric, in their uncontrollable, criminal chase for plunder and glory. Henrick, one of Werner alias Count Siegendorf ’s retainers, comments: The country (nominally now at peace) Is overrun with – God knows who – they fly By night, and disappear with sunrise; but Leave us no less desolation, nay, even more Than the most open warfare.941

Werner Siegendorf knows that he is helplessly caught in the mesh of his and his son Ulric’s family “inheritance”, the search for gain and glory combined with rashness of temper. But, again, this knowledge makes him neither wiser in his actions nor happier in his Byronic hero’s moods: My Destiny has so involved about me Her spider web, that I can only flutter Like the poor fly, but break it not.942

In Byron’s verse tale Mazeppa (1819), which begins with the description of the Swedish defeat by the Russians after the Battle of Poltawa (1709, the year of Mazeppa’s death), both King Charles XII and his Ukrainian commander Mazeppa are old men whose passions have not deserted them. They are each other’s alter ego. Their dreams of glory, as well as their dreams of love, have again proved dangerous and vain, even in their dotage. Mazeppa’s long tale of his experience of injustice and contingency bears the mark of distanced self-irony, which explains the poem’s mixture of styles, the exterior narrator’s romantic mood, and the interior narrator’s colloquial mood. Both King Charles and Mazeppa can reign over thousands of subjects and soldiers, even over their pain from wounds received in wars, but not over their passions – hence Mazeppa’s self-characterization: I am – or rather was – a prince, A chief of thousands, and could lead Them on where each would foremost bleed; But could not o’er myself evince The like control – […]943

Mazeppa’s narrative, which tells of his falling in love with a Polish Palatine’s wife, Theresa, his punishment of being bound naked onto the back of wild horse that carried him through forests and rivers until it fell dead, and his fortuitous rescue, 941 Byron, Werner, IV/ 1, 50–54. 942 Ibid. IV/1, 307–309. 943 Byron, Mazeppa, lines 290–294.

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is rich in symbolic meaning. It illustrates man’s animal and instinctive nature, his helplessness under the impact of passion, and his aimless life which ends somewhere in a simple collapse. Mazeppa’s concluding narration of his rescue by a beautiful Cossack woman, which led to his becoming a Cossack Hetman or commander, recalls Don Juan’s rescue by Haid8e, his next femme fatale, and also shows the radical contingency and absurd circularity of human life. Narrating the story of his glory and fall and regained glory from the point of view of his final fall shortly before his death, Mazeppa is full of vain hope for another rise to glory and success. In spite of his experience of the circular absurdity of his life, man will not let go until he dies. Disappointed in vain and dangerous dreams of love, Byronic man seeks his satisfaction in equally vain and dangerous dreams of glory. “Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure”. It is a symptom of the unceasing re-enactment of the Fall of man – the myth as reinterpreted by Romantic Disillusionism – that, after falling in love, they fall in war. The words “vanity”, “vain”, and “fall” are among the most frequently used in Byron’s poetic vocabulary.944 Thus, in Byron’s oriental tale Lara (1814), sequel to The Corsair (1814), all the high chivalry of Conrad-Lara’s heroic battles are repeatedly and insistently marked as vain. The experienced and careworn Lara, Childe-Harold-like in his disillusionment, is nonetheless not beyond the reach of human passions, his insight into the vanity of love and war notwithstanding. When conflict comes, human nature (as manifested his youthful war instincts) makes him both fall back into his old habits and eventually fall on the battlefield. Lara’s aggression against Otho, his enemy, becomes uncontrollable just as he loses all control over his soldiers, the orderly battle becoming totally chaotic, “And Carnage smiled upon her daily dead”.945 Nature looks on indifferently. Paradoxically, Lara’s initial victory is the reason for his downfall: Fresh with the nerve the new-born impulse strung, The first success to Lara’s numbers clung: But that vain victory hath ruined all, They form no longer to their leader’s call: In blind confusion on the foe they press, And think to snatch is to secure success.946

Lara’s death in the arms of Gulnare-Kaled, who, crossdressed as a page, had faithfully yet vainly followed the man she loves, is quite unheroic, especially as Gulnare-Kaled’s persistent illusion of life and love over Lara’s dead body casts a sinister shade upon the whole story of both oriental tales. Instead of a romantic 944 I.D. Young, A Concordance to the Poetry of Byron, Austin TX 1965. 945 Byron, Lara, 1814, 2. 281. 946 Ibid. 2. 10. 282–287.

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ending with two lovers finally united in Liebestod, the narrator tells of oblivion and disillusion: This [illusion] could not last – she lies by him she lov’d; Her tale untold – her truth too dearly prov’d.947

Two years later, in The Siege of Corinth (1816), the end of both the titular Byronic hero and the besieged city is even more anti-climactic. The august war between believers and infidels (as seen both from the Muslim and Christian point of view) ends in their common death when the magazine is fired. The deadly enemies Alp and Minotti, impelled by the same irresistible human instincts of hatred and revenge, end where Minotti’s son ended, with a “deadly earth-shock” in the jungle of life where the wild beasts are briefly enlivened, and where the worms and birds of prey wait for their food: “Thus was Corinth lost and won!”.948 Ultimately, there is neither defeat nor victory ; neither paradise lost nor paradise regained. In his unfinished lyrical drama The Deformed Transformed (MS Pisa 1822), a counterpiece to the first part of Goethe’s Faust (1808) excluding the possibility of salvation, Byron demonstrated this vanity of the passion of war in the character of Arnold. An ugly hunchback, he is made miserable by his deformity ; his invincible passions do not allow him the !taqan_a recommended by Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus any more than Byron’s own passions allowed him equanimity with regard to his own club foot. Arnold’s mother Bertha, who bedevils her son with his hunchback, reflects Byron’s Calvinistic Scottish mother Catherine Gordon of Gight, who would interpret her son’s club foot as an outward, visible sighn of his inward, spiritual reprobation – his expulsion from Paradise. Man’s paradisiacal wish to be perfect becomes apparent in Arnold’s long search for an ideal form, and his inability to find such in earthly history. The Devil’s presentation of phantoms of bodies that Arnold might assume in exchange for his soul proves abortive. Caesar is too bald, Socrates too swarthy, Antony looks too depressed, Alcibiades and Demetrius Poliorcetes seem second best, and, finally, Arnold chooses the form of Achilles only because the Devil presses for a decision. The Devil will not insist on a formal contract signed with Arnold’s blood because the contract is self-fulfilling; a soul aspiring for military glory will of necessity become guilty and will duly become the Devil’s. That sarcastic remark – that the conqueror’s contract with Hell need not be signed in his own blood (as it is signed in the blood of others) – is followed by a sly implication that the driven will is not free: “You shall have no bond But your own will, no contract

947 Ibid. 2. 626–627. 948 Byron, The Siege of Corinth, stanza 33.

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save your deeds”.949 The Devil’s assumption of the name of Caesar and of Arnold’s cast-off shape is equally sarcastic. A conqueror’s name is the Devil’s best disguise, and Arnold’s hunchback form will follow him as his doppelganger, both an extrapolation of the evil not to be shaken off and the truth not to be escaped. Caesar the Devil is thus to Arnold what Goethe’s Mephistopheles is to Faust, a witty exploder of all theological justifications and all strategies of selfdeceit, with the fundamental difference that Byron’s Devil is right in his Pyrrhonian negation. It is in this function that, after the war and at the unfinished drama’s end, he unmasks the popular chorus’s repeated praise of peace and spring as a mere illusion. The hunter’s bugle proves man a bloodthirsty creature both in war and peace and recalls to mind that thirst for blood and glory will never allow wars to die out, so that Caesar speaks in opposition to the stupid chorus of peasants: Oh! Shadow of glory! Dim image of war! But the chace hath no story, Her hero no star, Since Nimrod, the Founder Of empire and chace, Who made the woods wonder And quake for their race.950

The drama’s title explains its central philosophy as demonstrated by the Devil. The “transformation” of “deformation” proves senseless, aimless, and cyclical on all levels, leading to no improvement in a cyclical world incapable of being improved. When Arnold exchanges his initial physical deformity which is matched with psychic beauty for later physical beauty, that is in turn matched with psychic deformity (and followed by the Devil in Arnold’s hunchback form). Whichever way the transformation takes place, man’s doppelganger will follow and give the lie to Platonic kalokagathia. To the Devil, this disorderly world is a kind of modern tragicomedy, a “comic pantomime”951 where he plays the puppets as “The spirit’s pastime in his idler hours”.952 Byron’s Tasso speaks of “this vast lazar-house of many woes” “Where laughter is not mirth”, meaning his madhouse as typifying the madhouse that is the whole world.953 The laughter of modern tragicomedy is crazed, bitter, mixed with tragic resignation – the Devil’s rather than God’s gift to man.954 Where there 949 950 951 952 953 954

Byron, The Deformed Transformed, 1824, I/1. 150–151. Ibid. III/1. 42–49. Ibid.II/3, 32. Ibid.I/2, 320–321. Byron, The Lament of Tasso, 1817, 4. 83–84. K.S. Guthke, Modern Tragicomedy, New York 1966, and D. Arendt, Der “poetische Nihi-

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is no world order, as this world of fools and maniacs, there can be no distinction of decorum either in life or art, a central observation in the sceptical philosophy of Klingemann’s sarcastic speaker Kreuzgang: Ein paarmal jagte man mich aus den Kirchen, weil ich dort lachte, und ebenso oft aus Freudenhäusern, weil ich darin beten wollte.955

In a letter to his family dated February 1834, Büchner assumed the Byronic pose of bitter laughter (instead of the alternative Byronic pose of sentimental complaint) when he characterized man as the helpless victim and fool of circumstance, whom knowledge and reason will never improve. His disdain and laughter are thus not only aimed at illiterate and stupid men but also at himself as sharing man’s absurd nature: Man nennt mich einen Spötter. Es ist wahr, ich lache oft; aber ich lache nicht darüber, wie jemand ein Mensch, sondern nur darüber, daß er ein Mensch ist, wofür er ohnehin nichts kann, und lache dabei über mich selbst, der ich sein Schicksal teile.956

Where the tragic and the comic are simultaneous and identical, as in Beddoes’s tragedy with the comic title Death’s Jest-Book or Alfred de Musset’s drama On ne badine pas avec l’amour (1834), they heighten each other so that the comic can no longer provide relief for the tragic.957 This devilish integration is achieved in the Byronic hero’s d8doublement de la personnalit8, which allows him to laugh at himself and his own tragically absurd existence, though without relief-providing Positive Romantic Irony. The spoiler and discoverer of truth cannot help but infernally sneer at the world and himself, just as the Devil sneers at Arnold when he accepts Achilles’s large shape despite the warning that it exposes him to unnecessary dangers in the time of firearms: Arnold must be great. Neither can the Devil help sneering when he observes (and sacrilegiously comments) men’s irrational behaviour in the Siege and Sack of Rome by the mercenaries of Emperor Charles V (1527), in which he and Arnold participate. Both the officers, such as the Duke of Bourbon (Charles III), who dies in the siege, and the mercenaries – be they Germans or Spaniards, Lutherans or Roman Catholics – act as “bloodhounds”, hunting for prey. Their search for glory is mingled with lust for rape and gold, so that all national, social, or religious distinctions vanish, as does the distinction between man and beast. Even when the war is over, the Chorus of Peasants sings of the pleasures of the chase. The “bloodhound” man continues war with his hunting bloodhounds; Nimrod is “the Founder Of empire and chace”. Byron’s anticipation of Freud, H.G. Wells, and the trench poets of the lismus” in der Romantik, Tübingen 1972, II. 520–521 (with reference to Klingemann’s Nachtwachen). 955 Klingemann, Nachtwachen, ed. cit. 68. 956 Büchner, Briefe, in: Sämtliche Werke, 404. 957 Guthke, Modern Tragicomedy, 57–59.

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Great War is astonishing. Arnold survives the war but falls in love with Olimpia, a femme fatale no less dangerous than the war itself, being both victim and victimizer. Arnold-Achilles has met his Penthesilea, destined to destroy him.958 The Devil, who naturally enjoys such absurd chaos and disharmony, bursts out in sneering laughter at and ironic admiration of arrogant man, who believes in the superiority of his reason yet continually falls back into his primordial instincts, who trusts his power to shape his life yet is a puppet on strings, who deems the stars were made for him to look at yet would find his “ant hill” earth burned by the accidental fall of one single star : And these are Men, forsooth! Heroes and chiefs, the flower of Adam’s bastards!959

The most mordantly deconstructive exposition of the vanity of war and heroism, however, occurs in Don Juan. The unrequiting dangers into which Johnson and Juan place themselves to quench their “thirst For glory gaping o’er a sea of slaughter”960 are too obvious – and the description of the gruesome carnage on the battlefield at Ismail is too lively – to need further comment. Its close relationship to the vanity of love is made apparent in the first stanza of canto seven quoted above, forming the transition from the love adventures to the war adventures of Don Juan.961 The image of the fleeting meteor, Byron’s frequent symbol of illusory visions, has been discussed at length. The image of the polar lights, aurora borealis and aurora australis, seen by a wanderer in the arctic regions again suggests the irreconcilable antithesis of illusion and reality. Man refuses to see this distinction and follows the treacherous will-o’-the-wisps, reaching for the impossible, because, in the “waste and icy clime”962 of reality, he stands in need of illusions. Thus man’s airy dreams of military glory must inevitably expire in blank disillusionment. It is this order and law of nature which Byron has in mind when he makes Alp prefer the sight of dying soldiers sweltering in their warm blood to that of dead soldiers being fed upon by vultures, dogs, and worms.963 The first sight still admits illusory notions of fame and honour, whereas the second, the necessary sobering consequence of the first, leaves nothing but the humiliating impression of decay and time’s triumph. Future glory, the narrator comments in 958 Caesar’s commentary in Byron, The Deformed Transformed, II/3, 144–146. 959 Ibid. I/2, 313–329. 960 Ibid. 7. 50. 6–7. Also cf. Byron, Letter to Thomas Moore, 8 August 1822, in: Letters and Journals, IX. 191: “[…] these cantos contain a full detail (like the storm in Canto Second) of the siege and assault of Ismael, with much of sarcasm on those butchers in large business, your mercenary soldiery […]” 961 Byron, Don Juan, 7. 1. 1–8. 962 Ibid. 7. 2. 4. 963 Byron, The Siege of Corinth, lines 434–449.

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an ensuing reflection, must share the fate of all past glories, as future monuments must share the fate of all past monuments, falling prey to all-devouring and alloblivious time: There is a temple in ruin stands, Fashion’d by long-forgotten hands; Two or three columns, and many a stone, Marble and granite, with grass o’ergrown! Out upon Time! it will leave no more Of the things to come than the things before! Out upon Time! who for ever will leave But enough of the past for the future to grieve O’er that which hath been, and o’er that which must be: What we have seen, our sons shall see; Remnants of things that have pass’d away, Fragments of stone rear’d by creatures of clay!964.

The young, twenty-year-old Byron had already discovered the illusory and vain pursuit of immortality through military glory to be one of the ineradicable roots of human misery. As early as 1810, on his first voyage to the East, Byron had paid daily visits to the fabled battleground of Troy,965 “That field which blood bedew’d in vain”.966 He had stood there, thrilled with awe and agitation, musing on the evanescent transitory nature of martial splendour. All that remained of Troy was “a lone and nameless barrow”.967 The tombstones outlive the dead, dust outlives the tombstones, but in Troy the “very dust is gone”.968 His exalted description of the Alpine sublime in the third Canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1816), bubble-pricked in quite anti-sublime questions on the aim and purpose of this world, made him reject the old, conservative, king-mountain topos in favour of an impression of the diminutive nature of man, including Napoleon and himself, when compared with “yonder Alpine snow, Imperishably pure beyond all things below”.969 It is true that Byron had to admit that the great conquerors of the earth were still sporadically remembered, at least by the educated, but he also knew just how far short they had fallen of their illusory ambitions. On looking down

964 Ibid. lines 450–461. For the various uses to which nineteenth-century literati put the theme and motif of ruins see Stefanie Fricke, Memento Mori: Ruinen alter Hochkulturen und die Furcht vor dem eigenen Untergang in der englischen Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts, Trier 2009. 965 Byron, Ravenna Journal, 11 January 1821, in: Letters and Journals, VIII. 21–22. 966 Byron, The Bride of Abydos, 2. 23. Byron’s reflections on Troy in the second canto of The Bride of Abydos were occasioned by the geographical proximity of Abydos to Troy. 967 Ibid. 2. 49. 968 Ibid. 2. 54. 969 Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 3. 67. 8–9. See Cian Duffy, The Landscapes of the Sublime, 1700–1830, Basingstoke 2013, 63.

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from the abode of the dead, Napoleon must smile to see the “little that he was and sought to be”,970 and, as far as Alexander is concerned, How vain, how worse than vain, at length appear The madman’s wish, the Macedonian’s tear! He wept for worlds to conquer – half the earth Knows not his name […]971

Ismail, the fortified town in Bessarabia held by the Turks since the sixteenth century and taken by the Russians in 1790, belonged to neither the occupants nor the assailants. That war between the empires of Turkey and Russia did not count among the Romantic wars of liberation which Byron sanctioned in spite of his doubt of their ultimate establishment of freedom and justice,972 and in support of which he finally died in spite of the impurity of his motives. To Byron’s view, the sole political motive for the Siege of Ismail is “lust of power”.973 Both the Sultan of Turkey and Empress Catherine of Russia are far from the scene of action, the former with his harem of pretty slaves, the latter with her guard of soldiers.974 Politics is a bothersome interruption of their pleasures, and so they confer it upon their plenipotentiaries to the detriment of their own and their peoples’ interests. The satire on the old and new and ever incorrigible sovereigns of the post-Napoleonic era by proxy, is obvious: Had Catherine and the Sultan understood Their own true interests, which kings rarely know, Until ’tis taught by lessons rather rude, There was a way to end their strife, although Perhaps precarious, had they but thought good, Without the aid of Prince or Plenipo: She to dismiss her guards and he his harem, And for their other matters, meet and share ’em.975

In Byron’s narration, the Sultan leaves the matter of Ismail to his chief Pasha, and Catherine, the “greatest of all sovereigns and whores”,976 to one of her tall paramours, the Prince Potemkin,977 who orders the capture without even consulting the Empress.978 When the city is taken and lost, the chief Pasha, safe in his stone bastion, condescends at length to ask for information concerning the outcome of 970 971 972 973 974 975 976 977 978

Byron, The Age of Bronze, line 92. Ibid. lines 33–6. Byron, Don Juan, 7. 40. 1–4; 8. 4. 7–8; 8. 5. 1–8. Ibid. 7. 40. 5. Ibid. 6. 90–93. Ibid. 6. 95. 1–8. Ibid. 6. 92. 8. Ibid. 7. 37. 1–8. Ibid. 7.40. 1–8.

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the battle, and does not even think it necessary to negotiate and sign the surrender himself.979 Byron’s description of his “martial stoicism” in the midst of his city’s ruins is a splendid example of the poem’s ironic style: In the meantime, cross-legged, with great sang-froid, Among the scorching ruins he sate smoking Tobacco on a little carpet; – Troy Saw nothing like the scene around; – yet looking With martial stoicism, nought seemed to annoy His stern philosophy ; but gently stroking His beard, he puffed his pipe’s ambrosial gales, As if he had three lives as well as tails.980

When Juan leaves for the Court of Petersburg after the Russian victory, we see how shockingly the Russian sovereign’s interest in the fate of her valiant soldiers resembles that of the chief Pasha. Unmoved by the cruel deaths of so many human beings, Catherine looks on the war as on a cockfight in which she has made her bets, turning the fate of thousands into a pastime for sovereigns: Don Juan, who had shone in the late slaughter, Was left upon his way with the dispatch, Where Blood was talked of as we would of Water ; And carcases, that lay as thick as thatch O’er silenced cities, merely served to flatter Fair Catherine’s pastime, – who looked on the match Between these nations as a main of cocks, Wherein she liked her own to stand like rocks.981

It is in the service of such debauched monarchs and politicians, spoiled by luxury, located far away from and virtually not even interested in the scene of action, that the soldiers risk their lives and vainly die in pursuit of immortality that glory will hardly confer upon them. The soldiers promptly swallow the deadly bait laid out for them in the shape of an embroidered uniform and medals, ironically called “things immortal to immortal man, As purple to the Babylonian harlot”. .982 They see glory and run before it as pigs were proverbially 979 980 981 982

Ibid. 8. 120. 1–8. Ibid. 8. 121. 1–8; cf. ibid. 8. 98. 2–5. Ibid. 9. 29. 1–8. Ibid. 7. 84. 2–3. Reference to Revelation 17, 1–5. Byron habitually associated the Babylonian whore’s garments of purple and gold with the spilling of blood, as in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 1. 29. 6–9, where the Babylonian whore denotes the murderous Roman Catholic Church: But here [in Mafra] the Babylonian whore hath built A dome, where flaunts she in such glorious sheen, That men forget the blood which she hath spilt, And bow the knee to Pomp that loves to varnish guilt.

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(according to one of the old zoological pseudodoxia epidemica) said to see and run before the wind, an image that immediately recalls another : the ship metaphor as discussed above. It was Byron’s intention to demoralize the military, both the officers and soldiers who were enforcing the restoration of the old order and obeying the maxim “Gegen Demokraten Helfen nur Soldaten”:983 But Glory’s Glory, and if you would find What that is – ask the pig who sees the wind. At least he feels it, and some say he sees, Because he runs before it like a pig; Or, if that simple sentence should displease, Say that he scuds before it like a brig, A schooner […]984

The implications of these two comparisons are obvious. Glory is an irresistible passion to which man cannot help but yield, although it is mere wind and nothingness. The pig which instinctively runs before that wind reminds us of the “nine farrow” of the sow of glory enumerated in the poem’s second stanza: Vernon, the butcher Cumberland, Wolfe, Hawke, Prince Ferdinand, Granby, Burgoyne, Keppel, Howe, Evil and good, have had their tithe of talk, And fill’d their sign-posts then, like Wellesley now. Each in their turn like Banquo’s monarchs stalk, Followers of fame, ‘nine farrow’ of that sow.985

This is the actual reason why Byron perverts the traditional presentation of the epic hero in the first lines of his own epic poem: I WANT a hero: an uncommon want, When every year and month sends forth a new one, Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant, The age discovers he is not the true one.986

It would be a barren oversimplification to see this perversion of Virgil’s exordial “Arma virumque cano” as a mere formal sign that Byron was about to write an 983 Wilhelm von Merckel, Die fünfte Zunft, in: Zwanzig Gedichte, Berlin 1850, 58. 984 Byron, Don Juan, 7. 84. 7–8 and 7. 85. 1–5; see Steffan’s and Pratt’s commentary, ed. cit. 661. 985 Ibid. 1. 2. 1–6. 986 Ibid. 1. 1. 1–4. Also cf. ibid. 7. 83. 1–4: When I call ‘fading’ martial immortality, I mean, that every age and every year, And almost every day, in sad reality, Some sucking hero is compelled to rear, […]

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anti-epic, as Sterne wrote an anti-novel. In Byron’s philosophy, cant (meaning a hypocritical repetition of official dogma) was the negative contrary of variety and heterogeneity which denied one hero, one style, or one sexual orientation. The narrator “wants” a hero because, in his view of things, deeds of valour confer but a short-lived, fickle, and transient glory upon the warrior which is incompatible with the epic immortality of one hero – Ulysses or Aeneas, Orlando or Rinaldo, as claimed by Homer, Virgil, Ariosto, and Tasso. In addition, the stanza refers to the fast-moving nature of contemporary fashions, as also attested by Madame Tussaud’s frequently exchanged wax figures in the Lyceum Theatre and by Lady Anne Hamilton’s satire The Epics of the Ton, or, The Glories of the Great World (1807): Nelson was once Britannia’s god of war, And still should be so, but the tide is turned; There’s no more to be said of Trafalgar, ’Tis with our hero quietly inurn’d; Because the army’s grown more popular, At which the naval people are concerned; Besides, the Prince is all for the land-service, Forgetting Duncan, Nelson, Howe, and Jervis.987

The Marquis Gabriel de Castelnau, upon whose Essai sur l’histoire ancienne et moderne de la nouvelle Russie988 Byron based his account of the Siege of Ismail,989 despaired of relating all the events of even the first day of the Russian attack and limited his report to the feats of some distinguished strangers fighting on the Russian side: the Prince de Ligne, Langeron, and Damas.990 Byron cites this as another proof of the short-lived nature of martial glory : This being the case, may show us what fame is: For out of these three ‘preux Chevaliers,’ how Many of common readers give a guess That such existed? (and they may live now For aught we know). Renown’s all hit or miss; There’s Fortune even in fame, we must allow.991

The only soldier among the three who can be dimly remembered is Field Marshal Charles Joseph, Prince de Ligne, whose published writings have “half withdrawn from him oblivion’s screen”.992 But the memory of the others who fought no less 987 988 989 990 991 992

Ibid. 1. 4. 1–8. 3 vols., Paris 1820. See Steffan’s and Pratt’s commentary, ed. cit. 658. Byron, Don Juan, 7. 32. 1–8. Ibid. 7. 33. 1–6. Ibid. 7. 33. 7–8.

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heroically has completely faded, together with the names of innumerable fallen heroes printed in the gazettes: Of all our modern battles, I will bet You can’t repeat nine names from each Gazette.993

Newspaper glory, enjoyed for a day after death, is one of Byron’s favourite proofs of the folly of seeking immortality in war, one which he admittedly could not resist himself: I wonder (although Mars no doubt’s a God I Praise) if a man’s name in a bulletin May make up for a bullet in his body?994

And even this fleeting shadow of glory was insecure insofar as many names were misspelt in the casualty lists: Thrice happy he whose name has been well spelt In the despatch: I knew a man whose loss Was printed Grove, although his name was Grose.995

Soldiers should realize that their very names struck them from the roll call of fame and left them as victims of eternal oblivion. As for the Russian soldiers, they fought as cruelly and valiantly as Achilles himself, but they do not share his immortality for as simple a reason as the harshness of their names.996 The poet, Byron ironically demonstrates, cannot erect a lasting monument to their fame because he will find it quite impossible to harmonize their unpronounceable names with the demand for poetic euphony : Still I’ll record a few, if but to increase Our euphony – there were Strongenoff and Strokonoff, Meknop, Serge Lwow, Arseniew of modern Greece, And Tschitsshakoff and Roguenoff and Chokenoff And others of twelve consonants a-piece. And more might be found out, if I could poke enough Into gazettes; but Fame (capricious strumpet) It seems, has got an ear as well as trumpet, And cannot tune those discords of narration, Which may be names at Moscow, into rhyme.997

993 994 995 996 997

Ibid. 7. 34. 7–8. Ibid. 7. 21. 1–3. Ibid. 8. 18. 6–8. Ibid. 7. 14. 3–8. Ibid. 7. 15. 1–8 and 7. 16. 1–2.

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As for the English soldiers in the service of the Russian army, they were Tom, Dick, and Harry ; persons of no note, at least with respect to their names. The Christian doctrine that every individual is God’s creature and has his own value without distinction of rank in the world beyond is sacrilegiously derided: ’Mongst them were several Englishmen of pith, Sixteen called Thomson, and nineteen named Smith.998

Their Christian names, too, obstructed their road to falsely promised fame with their commonness. Among the sixteen Thomsons, there were one Jack, one Bill, and fourteen Jameses.999 Among the nineteen Smiths, there were three Peters and an unspecified number of “Jacks and Gills and Wills and Bills”.1000 And, finally, Byron adds, their obscure origin, as well as their common names, excluded them from more than mere newspaper praise: But when I’ve added that the elder Jack Smith Was born in Cumberland among the hills, And that his father was an honest blacksmith, I’ve said all I know of a name that fills Three lines of the dispatch in taking ‘Schmacksmith’, A village of Moldavia’s waste, wherein He fell, immortal in a bulletin.1001

This also explains Byron’s choice of the name of John Johnson. Byron ingeniously contrasts this ordinary name with the man’s extraordinary valour to keep the reader constantly aware of the self-acknowledged vanity of Johnson’s pursuit of military glory. Here a typically ironic specimen of this technique of satire appears: Up came John Johnson: (I will not say ‘Jack,’ For that were vulgar, cold, and common place On great occasions, such as an attack On cities, as hath been the present case:) Up Johnson came […]1002

So Byron ridicules the courage of Juan and Johnson, who, with nothing but ephemeral newspaper praise to expect instead of real heroic immortality, cut their way through thousands of dead and dying soldiers, not even able to guess where they might be going,

998 999 1000 1001 1002

Ibid. 7. 18. 7–8. Ibid. 7. 19. 1–2. Ibid. 7. 19. 5–8 and 7. 20. 1. Ibid. 7. 20. 2–8. Ibid. 8. 97. 1–5.

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But fighting thoughtlessly enough to win, To their two selves, one whole bright bulletin.1003

The aimlessness of the two soldiers on the battlefield is symbolic of the aimlessness of their whole engagement in the war, as well as that of the blind will, and indeed all life in general. This is made especially plain in the case of Juan.1004 Separated from Johnson and his corps, Juan finds himself alone and at odds against the enemy. Neither knowing nor caring where he fights,1005 even forgetting the welfare of his own corps,1006 he rushes into the heart of the battle, where the brightest fires are seen and the loudest cannons are heard.1007 By comparing him to lonely travellers hunting a will-o’-the-wisp over bog and brake or to shipwrecked sailors looking for the nearest shelter, Byron exposes the vanity and danger of man’s passion for glory, as well as his instinctive propensity to wreak his own destruction, a component of human nature which undermines all meliorism or personal and historical t]kor: Perceiving nor commander nor commanded, And left at large, like a young heir, to make His way to – where he knew not – single handed; As travellers follow over bog and brake An ‘Ignis fatuus’ or as sailors stranded Unto the nearest hut themselves betake; So Juan, following honour and his nose, Rushed where the thickest fire announced most foes.1008

In Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, Adrian-Shelley’s idealism in his engagement in the War of Greek Independence proves to be merely an illusion, whereas Raymond-Byron’s pessimism is confirmed by brutal facts. Contrary to his professed Hegelian belief in the progress of history, Adrian experiences a chaos of murder and rape, in which all distinctions between Greeks and Turks vanish. Persisting in tragic error, Adrian remains blind to Raymond’s complicity with (or at least inability to oppose) “the blood-thirsty war-dogs”, with “their dreams of massacre and glory”.1009 And in Lermontov’s verse tale Mtsiri (1840), the titular hero, vainly trying to regain his freedom and native land, relapses into man’s original 1003 Ibid. 8. 19. 7–8. 1004 Cf. ibid. 8. 29. 1–3: Juan, who had no shield to snatch, and was No Caesar, but a fine young lad, who fought He knew not why […] 1005 Ibid. 8. 33. 1. 1006 Ibid. 8. 31. 8. 1007 Ibid. 8. 33. 5–8. 1008 Ibid. 8. 32. 1–8. 1009 M. Shelley, The Last Man, ed. cit. 162.

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bestiality when, confronted with an aggressive leopard, he turns into a leopard himself. The noblest character is no safeguard against atavism: I was a frightful thing to see; As wild as leopard, fierce and free.1010

It is the slave Zanga in Grillparzer’s Der Traum ein Leben (MS 1817–1834, 1840) who awakens the warlike trait in Rustan’s otherwise peaceful nature, meaning that Rustan becomes enslaved to the pursuit of military glory. The virtuous and domestic Rustan becomes a restlessly homicidal criminal when Zanga – simultaneously slave and devil – describes with ecstatic fervor how ruthlessly and irrationally warriors follow their killing instincts irrespective of friend or foe, as if intoxicated: Beide Heere sich erreichen, Brust an Brust, Götterlust! Herüber, hinüber, Jetzt Feinde, jetzt Brüder Streckt der Mordstrahl nieder. Empfangen und geben Der Tod und das Leben Im wechselnden Tausch, Wild taumelnd im Rausch.1011

When Byron’s successors and standard-bearers in the Victorian Period, Sydney Dobell and Alexander Smith, published their volume of subversive poems on the Crimean War, the thirty-nine Sonnets on the War (1855), followed by Dobell’s equally sceptical companion volume entitled England in Time of War (1856), they provoked the anger of traditionalists as widely as Byron had done, although many readers seem to have taken the ironic jingoism of the poems literally. Dobell’s wartime “Psalm of the Heart” (1856), for instance, is an ironically pious prayer for victory on the battlefield, one of a sinful nation that, contrary to biblical and military norms, is both morally and strategically undeserved. It is a prayer for foolhardiness, recklessness, blindness, and madness in action, recalling Byron’s Don Juan and John Johnson in the Battle of Ismail as the shouting down of reason is underscored by repeated, stupidly march-like rhyme words such as “battle” and “victory”:

1010 Lermontov, =glaY, 1840, section 18, lines 10–11, in: Mtsiri and Other Selected Poems, transl. cit. 43. 1011 Grillparzer, Der Traum ein Leben: Dramatisches Märchen in vier Aufzügen, 1840, end of act 1, in: Werke, ed. cit. I. 622–623.

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Let the brave heart be as a drunkard’s bosom, When the thick fume is frozen in the bosom, And the bare sin lies shivering in the bosom; Let the bold eye be sick and crazed with midnight, Strained and cracked with aching days of midnight, Swarmed and foul with creeping shades of midnight.1012

Undermining fighting morale on both the war and home fronts by feeding general readers’ scepticism of a providential world aim – including just wars, colonial expansion, and the divine purpose of self-sacrifice – made Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine continue kicking its fallen opponent, while other reviewers tactically ignored the volumes.1013 After all, negative reviews had made Wordsworth and Keats, whose poetry might otherwise have gone unnoticed in the Romantic Period, famous. Aytoun had already successfully satirized that Byronic “Spasmodic School” in contributions to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in the years 1851–1854, and put a stop to its popularity by indicting its unclassical immorality, extravagance, opacity, and neglect of reason, rule, and form. Nevertheless, the Crimean War reanimated the Spasmodists as it confirmed their Byronic scepticism. That war was the first to be photographed and covered by daily reports in the press, meaning the senselessness of war could no longer be easily concealed under a Horatian “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” and the Classical Tradition’s praise of heroism and piety. On the other hand, sceptical poets were well advised to be as carefully subversive of patriotism and jingoism as Felicia Hemans had been in “Casabianca” (1826), praising while subtly doubting the heroism of self-sacrifice in times of war. On closer inspection, the behaviour and death of the French Captain Casabianca’s obedient son on the burning admiral ship in the Battle of the Nile (1798) are totally absurd and futile. Dobell’s short poem “Where Are You, Poets”, for instance, calls on war poets to celebrate the fallen so that “England may again deserve to lead Mankind”, the dead hero is envisaged as lying in state on the ground “As if the Bardic Heaven had thrown him down In model” for the poet’s making: “Close his eyes, That yours may learn him”.1014 It was allegedly Dobell’s last work, written on the death of a British officer fallen in heroic action in the Third AngloAshanti War.1015 With a Pyrrhonian irony anticipating the later poets of the Great War, Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon, Dobell’s poem insinuates the brutal reality of the war and the helplessness of the soldiers, whom blind, brutal fate had flung onto the battlefield. A poet must piously close his eyes and imagine a 1012 Dobell, England in Time of War, In War-Time: A Psalm of the Heart, lines 16–21, London 1856, 71–72. Note the intertextual biblical anaphora, marking the poem as an anti-Psalm. 1013 Mark A. Weinstein, The Spasmodic Controversy, 164. 1014 Dobell, Poetical Works, ed. John Nichol, London 1875, II. 377. 1015 Editor’s headnote, ibid.

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handsome youth beautifully lying in state on a catafalque, fallen for God and Country. Reality is the very contrary, as in Dobell’s and Smith’s disillusioned sonnet “The Army Surgeon” that imagines a doctor who labours his way over the blood-soaked and groaning battlefield, or in the first of their two sonnets entitled “The Wounded”, where a surgeon informs a wounded soldier that he is a cripple and his life will not be worth living. The soldier’s dreams of future love and prayers for treatment go unheard in the massacre. Instead of words of solace from the doctor or from a divine, the good soldier (prepared to stand back for a worse wounded comrade as in the legend of the death of Sir Philip Sidney) dies God-and-doctor-forsaken in a chaotic cacophony of various voices anticipating T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land (1922): He dies Even in the passionate prayer. ‘Good Doctor, say If thou canst give more than another day Of life?’ ‘I think there may be hope.’ ‘Pass on. I will not buy it with some widow’s son!’ ‘Help,’ ‘help,’ ‘help,’ ‘help!’ ‘God curse thee!’ ‘Doctor, stay, Yon Frenchman went down earlier in the day.’1016

Dobell’s England in Time of War gave similar portraits of the home front, which also foreshadowed the poetry of the Great War in its sceptical view of the ignorantly and uncompassionately jingoistic sentiments, both in England and Germany. Contrasting with patriotic war songs and splendid military displays in public are private anxieties and mourning. Bleak scenes of rain and desolation, inverting Keatsean scenes of overflow and joy, mirror the bleakness in the hearts of parents, wives, and lovers, who wait in vain for the return or have just heard news of the deaths of their boys. “She Touches a Sad String of Soft Recall”, the song of a mad girl whose lover has died, constitutes an absurd circle of ups and downs, neither prayer to God nor revelation of higher truths as were the utterances of mad men and women in Platonic Romanticism.1017 The same pattern can be found in “A Sailor’s Return”, spoken by a girl who awakens at dawn on a merry morning to a cockerel’s call. But the merry crowing instills an association of a dangerous bugle horn calling the soldiers to their deaths and the memory of her dream of her sailor-lover singing of his wish to return on the ever-repeated ups and downs of a merciless sea of death: ‘High, high, o’er the breakers, Low, low, on the knee, Sing ho! 1016 Dobell-Smith, Sonnets on the War, London 1855, 15. 1017 Dobell, England in Time of War, London 1856, 198–200.

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The billow That brings me back to thee!’1018

And in “A Nuptial Eve”, a compassionate narrator quotes the sad Scottish ballad of a lonely young bride “in the year of war and death”, a much-quoted archetypal lament of another woman over the loss of her young lover : The murmur of the mourning ghost That keeps the shadowy kine, ‘Oh, Keith of Ravelston, The sorrows of thy line!’ […] She makes her immemorial moan, She keeps her shadowy kine; Oh, Keith of Ravelston, The sorrows of thy line!1019

In the poetry of Byron, however, there exists another, quite harmless and certainly more positive, mode of pursuing glory : the artist’s effort to immortalize both his creations and himself. The creatures of the mind survive those of clay and are “Essentially immortal” in their bodiless existence:1020 Shakespeare’s Shylock and Othello, for instance, or Otway’s Pierre – famous Venetians in famous English dramatic works.1021 It is in them that the poet seeks refuge from his state of mortal bondage,1022 as indeed all poetic creation is, to Byron, an attempt at escaping from this dull life into a brighter world and more beloved existence.1023 But, again, the would-be dreamer’s reason knows and convinces him (and his readers) that such escapes are only short-lived illusions. He could stand on the Bridge of Sighs, view Venice sinking back like seaweed into the sea from which she rose, imagine her decay completed and repeople the solitary shore with Shylock, Othello, and Pierre only momentarily.1024 Then he would infallibly experience the factual world’s superior strength and see the real constellations outshine the stars of the imagination:1025

1018 1019 1020 1021 1022 1023 1024 1025

Ibid. 54 (final stanza 6). Ibid. 116–117 (stanzas 1 and 11). Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 4. 5. 1–2. Ibid. 4. 4. 5–9. Ibid. 4. 5. 2–9 and 4. 6. 1–2. Ibid. 4. 6. 3–4. Also see G.M. Ridenour, The Style of Don Juan, 33. Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 4. 1–5. Ibid. 4. 6. 5–9. Also see Marchand, Byron: A Portrait, 270: “[…] he [Byron] always returned from the most airy speculations to reason and common sense.” Byron’s emotional love but rational distrust of the imagination is also manifested in his Romantic desire yet unromantic inability to find, like Wordsworth, tranquil joy in the remembrance of things past, best expressed in his lyric poem to the moon written for his Hebrew Melodies (1815)

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[…] waking Reason deems Such over-weening phantasies unsound, And other voices speak, and other sights surround.1026

This further awareness of the impossibility of escaping mortality in this life without indulging illusions does not necessarily involve the impossibility of achieving literary immortality after death. Byron must have known that Horace had already been in two minds about literary immortality – confident in the last of his Odes, sceptical in the last of his Epistles. And, as a friend and correspondent of his publisher John Murray involved in the making and unmaking of literary reputations (Robert Southey, Robert and Nathaniel Bloomfield), he must have been aware of the fact that literary survival depended on factors other than literary quality.1027 In Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage – even in the fourth canto published as late as 1818 – the speaker still holds some illusory confidence in a possible immortality of literary creation, though he shows uncertainty of his own poetic perpetuity.1028 The works of ancient authors still stand out among the vast heap of ruin and decay which the speaker is contemplating, their splendor undiminished. Cicero, “Rome’s least-mortal mind”,1029 Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso have outlived the ruins of both Rome and Italy and will not fall into oblivion.1030 The proud palaces of Venice are crumbling to the shore, the Rialto is in a state of decay, Tasso’s echoes have died with the voice of the songless gondolier, but Tasso’s memory survives.1031 Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara, could humiliate Tasso’s body by debasement and imprisonment among maniacs, but, while his own name is rotting in oblivion, he proved unable to quell the poet’s immortal fame:

1026 1027 1028 1029 1030

1031

and variously set to music by Romantic composers following Byron’s melody provider Isaac Nathan: SUN of the sleepless! melancholy star! Whose tearful beam glows tremulously far, That show’st the darkness thou canst not dispel, How like art thou to joy remember’d well! So gleams the past, the light of other days, Which shines, but warms not with its powerless rays; A night-beam Sorrow watcheth to behold, Distinct, but distant – clear – but, oh how cold! Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 4. 7. 7–9. Heather J. Jackson, Those Who Write for Immortality : Romantic Reputations and the Dream of Lasting Fame, New Haven CT 2015. Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 4. 9. 4–9 and 4. 10. 1–5. Ibid. 4. 44. 2. Ibid. 4 passim. Byron intimates Petrarch’s immortality by presenting him as “Watering the tree which bears his lady’s name [i. e. the laurel] With his melodious tears” (ibid. 4. 30. 8– 9); the laurel, an evergreen, served as a symbol of immortality, both on the poet’s brow and on the believer’s tomb. Ibid. 4. 3. 1–2.

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Glory without end Scatter’d the clouds away – and on that name attend The tears and praises of all time.1032

In contrast to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Don Juan contains no such fervid apotheosis of literary immortality. It unmasks all those self-deceptions that the speaker of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage had still adhered to, including the biographically obvious lie that Byron had not loved the world, nor the world him.1033 The incredible creed has vanished, especially with a larger view of time and civilizations. Scepticism has extended to the last fortress of faith and consolation – biblical transfiguration and hymnic glorification are no longer attributes of fame – not in the sense of a maturing of Byron’s sceptical philosophy, but in the sense of man’s constant and repeated instinctive pursuit of romantic illusions that he knows to be futile.1034 Again, a beautiful romantic illusion has evaporated; the illusion of not having lived and worked in vain is gone. In Ravenna, Byron found both the column commemorating the victory and death of the young Gaston de Foix, who had conquered that Italian city for the French King in 1512, and the little cupola above the tomb of Dante, whose ambition was not To add to the vain-glorious list of those Who dabble in the pettiness of fame, And make men’s fickle breath the wind that blows Their sail, and deem it glory to be class’d With conquerors, and virtue’s other foes, In bloody chronicles of ages past.1035

True, the peasants show their contempt for the hero by defiling his column with human excrement, whereas reverence is paid to the poet’s sepulchre.1036 Nonetheless, the monuments of the hero and the poet are subject to the same laws of decay. Dante’s humble tomb was opened and desecrated just as was the proud and strong pyramid of King Cheops of Egypt.1037 In Don Juan, Dante’s ashes are no longer seen as those of Michelangelo, Vittorio Alfieri, Galileo Galilei, and Niccolk Machiavelli – buried in the pantheon of Florence – had been seen in 1032 Ibid. 4. 36. 8–9 and 4. 37. 1. In view of the fact that Byron had already doubted “the sanguine Poet’s hope, To conquer ages, and with time to cope” in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (lines 949–950), this apotheosis of literary immortality must be seen in a polemical rather than confessional light. 1033 Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 3. 113–114. 1034 See also J.J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology, 144–145. 1035 Byron, The Prophecy of Dante, 1821, 1. 53–58. For the scepticism of Byron’s Dante concerning future Venetian freedom, as opposed to P.B. Shelley’s optimism, see Robinson, Shelley and Byron: The Snake and Eagle Wreathed in Fight, 179. 1036 Byron, Don Juan, 4. 103. 1–8; 4. 104. 1–4; 4. 105. 1–8. 1037 Ibid. 1. 219. 5–8. Also cf. the preceding stanza. For Byron’s knowledge of the political attempts to unearth and desecrate Dante’s relics see Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 4. 57. 9.

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Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, dust which is even in itself immortality. Together with the decay and profanation of their monuments, the memories of the hero and poet alike will fade to nothingness, like the memories of the heroes and poets of remote antiquity. The hero’s and the poet’s unequal attempts to “identify their dust From out the wide destruction”1038 are equally vain: The time must come, when both alike decay’d, The chieftain’s trophy, and the poet’s volume, Will sink where lie the songs and wars of earth, Before Pelides’ death, or Homer’s birth.1039

The principle of littera scripta manet may be allowed to hold a grain of truth insofar as the printed word sometimes survives the author’s tomb and immortalizes men and their various achievements,1040 – a thought we have already found in Byron’s reflections upon the distinguished foreigners fighting on the Russian side in the Battle of Ismail, notably the Prince de Ligne. Deeds of war unremembered in words are doomed to quick oblivion, so that the heroes of Troy would have been long forgotten if not for Homer’s famous epic.1041 Neither the poet nor the warrior, however, is in control of his posthumous fame – a central message of Byron’s historical dramas. In “Churchill’s Grave” (MS 1816), written on the model of the gravedigger scene in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and in the style of Wordsworth, Byron subverts both poets’ notions of posthumous fame. The sexton at the grave of the eighteenth-century poet Charles Churchill, corresponding to the gravedigger at the grave of Yorick, instills the Hamlet-like speaker with doubts about a famous poet’s future reputation in view of the ludicrous contingencies of history, “The Glory and the Nothing of a Name”.1042 Here, again, Byron contradicted “His British Godship” Shakespeare, whom he blamed for faults in dramatic and poetic style as well as world view.1043 The ludicrous con1038 1039 1040 1041

Byron, Don Juan, 4. 101. 4–5. Ibid. 4. 104. 5–8. Ibid. 3. 88. 7–8. Ibid. 3. 90. 5. Also cf. ibid. 12. 19. 1–8 : Why, I’m Posterity – and so are you ; And whom do we remember ? Not a hundred. Were every memory written down all true, The tenth or twentieth name would be but blundered : Even Plutarch’s lives have but picked out a few, And ’gainst those few your annalists have thundered ; And Mitford in the nineteenth century Gives, with Greek truth, the good old Greek the lie. 1042 Byron, Churchill’s Grave, MS Diodati 1816, 43. For a detailed interpretation of the poem in the context of Byron’s concept of history see Richard Lansdown, Byron’s Historical Dramas, Oxford 1992, 59–77. 1043 Lansdown, 78–101.

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tingencies of history make or unmake a name, including reports about a poet such as Byron’s divorce and conduct in his life as well as assessments of the quality of his literary production. Seen in larger historical dimensions, however, tempus edax rerum will inevitably prove the stronger principle. One day the author’s grave might be blank, and one day even his nation might exist no more, save for in chronicles. Then, Byron sarcastically remarks, Some dull MS. oblivion long has sank, Or graven stone found in a barrack’s station In digging the foundation of a closet, May turn his name up, as a rare deposit.1044

In his satirically mock-heroic verse epic Atta Troll, Heine derided the expectation of literary immortality in the comically compassionate narrator’s affirmation of a mere awkward bear’s death immortalized by art, as in the poetology of Schiller and Keats: Und von Wehmut tief ergriffen, Dacht ich dann an Schillers Worte: Was im Lied soll ewig leben, Muß im Leben untergehn!1045

Even Rückert’s mainly Positive Romantic work contains poems that reflect their author’s recurring doubts concerning lasting love and verse. “Herbstlieder”, for example, features speakers that occasionally see the wind, much like the speaker of Swinburne’s “A Forsaken Garden” (1878) after them, acting to uncover the naked truth below all illusions of paradise, caressing and spreading scent, and ultimately dismantling every bush of its deceptive roses: Läßt doch der spielende Wind nicht vom Strauch, Bis er ihn völlig gelichtet, Alles, o Herz, ist ein Wind und ein Hauch, Was wir geliebt und gedichtet.1046

In Byron’s wake, the narrator of Pushkin’s Evgeny Onegin (1825–1833), himself a Romantic Disillusionist seeking fulfillment in the enjoyment of the passing moment, can only hope that his lines will survive. He is quite aware that his hope for literary immortality is merely self-flattery as nobody would be content to leave the world without leaving a visible trace behind, such as poetry : And someone’s heart it will awaken; And this new strophe that I nurse 1044 Byron, Don Juan, 3. 89. 5–8. 1045 Heine, Atta Troll, caput 25, stanza 18, in: Sämtliche Schriften, IV. 566. 1046 Rückert, Herbstlieder, 10, in: Gesammelte poetische Werke, ed. cit. II. 562.

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Will not in Lethe drown, forsaken, If destiny preserves my verse. Perhaps some future ignoramus (A flattering hope!), when I am famous Will point to my illustrious portrait And say : now that man was a poet!1047

Following Byron and Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov elegiacally expressed his fear not of death itself, which he welcomed as a relief from life’s burdens, but that his verse, which aimed for immortality, would totally disappear with his death.1048 Letitia Elizabeth Landon voiced similar scepticism in numerous poems, also elegiacally rather than satirically – the two moods of Romantic Disillusionism. In her poem “The Festival”, set in a Poesque scene of unreflected mirth where the “young and the lovely are gathered”,1049 the experienced speaker addresses various revellers, among them a young girl whom a young poet would eternalize in verse.1050 But his short-lived song is borne away on the sighing wind, associating the unreal murmuring of sounds in floating sea-shells: Come thou, with thy glad golden ringlets, Like rain which is lit by the sun – With eyes, the bright spirit’s bright mirrors – Whose cheek and the rose-bud are one. While he of the lute and the laurel For thee has forgotten the throng, And builds on thy fairy-like beauty A future of sigh and of song. Ay, listen, but as unto music The wild wind is bearing away, As sweet as the sea-shells at evening, But far too unearthly to stay.1051

John Clare, the mad poet of nature and love, found himself akin to Byron and Landon’s young poet. He saw Byron’s funeral procession in London in 1824, remembered his erotic adventures and social ostracism, and witnessed the waning of his literary fame in the 1830s, all of which keenly reminded him of his 1047 1048 1049 1050

Pushkin, Evgeny Onegin, 1825–1833, chapter 2, stanza 40, lines 1–8, transl. cit. 53. Lermontov, 130. =QZp . 16 hYb\_, MS 1830, posth. 1889, in: Gedichte, 28. Landon, The Vow of the Peacock and Other Poems, The Festival, line 1, London 1835, 341. When the young revelling and beauty-addicted poet’s verse is called a “fabric of fancy and falsehood […] never for lasting designed” (lines 35–6), this doubt about beauty’s metaphysical dimension is formulated in direct opposition to John Keats. 1051 Ibid. lines 21–32, ed. cit. 342–343. By contrast, it should be remembered that William Wordsworth collected sea-shells and listened to their murmur as symbolizing eternity in mortal nature.

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own fall from fame into oblivion. Different types of dissolution and fall are a common theme in the poetry of Byron and Clare. Clare’s madhouse version of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage laments the ephemeral and deceptive nature both of love and fame, combined with a Byronic attack on universal hypocrisy : Fame blazed upon me like a comets glare Fame waned and left me like a fallen star Because I told the evil what they are And truth and falsehood never wished to mar My Life hath been a wreck […]1052

Such scepticism with regard to the eternity of art found numerous later expressions in the poetry of both Decadent and Modernist authors. D.G. Rossetti’s sonnet on the sonnet (1881), “A Sonnet is a moment’s monument”,1053 echoes it. And the old pagan speaker of Swinburne’s “Hymn to Proserpine” (1866), himself a poet crowned with “the bays”, has strength and pride enough to accept the fact that art is as mortal as love and refuses to accept any Christian immortality myth: Laurel is green for a season, and love is sweet for a day ; But love grows bitter with treason, and laurel outlives not May.1054

In the line from Byron to Pound and the War Poets, ephemerality paradoxically became the only remaining element of permanence. Thomas Hardy, for instance, wrote poems in sceptical response to Keats’s and Shelley’s disembodied highflying or hidden birds that symbolize art’s transcendence and eternity, “Shelley’s Skylark” (MS 1887) and “The Darkling Thrush” (MS 1900). Hardy’s thrush is old, frail, gaunt, and small, and his skylark is dead, “A pinch of unseen, unguarded dust”.1055 Their traditional promise of hope and permanence is not totally denied, but becomes extremely doubtful. The writings of Georges Cuvier and Erasmus Darwin confirmed Byron’s scepticism of literary immortality, the gift of Mnemosyne, by setting human civilization into even larger dimensions of time and space. This world of ours, Byron suggested, may be just one of many worlds to be destroyed like all those

1052 Clare, Child Harold, MS ca 1840–1841, lines 426–429, in: Later Poems, ed. cit. 49. 1053 D.G. Rossetti, The House of Life, [Sonnet on the Sonnet], 1881, line 1, in: Collected Poetry and Prose, 127. Also note the stress on the commercial nature of art, the subversive reverse side of its idealistic aspirations. 1054 Swinburne, Poems and Ballads, Hymn to Proserpine, 1866, lines 37–38, in: Complete Works, I. 202. 1055 Hardy, Shelley’s Skylark, MS March 1887, line 4, in: Complete Poems, 101. Hardy wrote his response in the neighbourhood of Leghorn, where Shelley had written To a Skylark (1820).

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before,1056 and new worlds will arise to which our civilization will be likened to the notions we now entertain Of Titans, Giants, fellows of about Some hundred feet in height, not to say miles, And Mammoths and your winged Crocodiles.1057

The subversion of official doctrine is even worse in the then fashionable catastrophistic Cuvierism of Byron’s Cain. In Hades, Cain sees other and more beautiful creatures than once lived, and Lucifer informs him that they are shades of former inhabitants of former earths now extinct, unjustly felled By a most crushing and inexorable Destruction and disorder of the elements, Which struck a world to chaos, as a chaos Subsiding has struck out a world: such things, Though rare in time, are frequent in eternity.1058

When Lucifer adds that those previous civilizations degenerated before their extinction, that every earth deteriorated to a new and worse one and that Adam’s race will also degenerate before its final extinction,1059 his words are meant to discourage and subvert. He represents history not only as an absurd, eternal circle, but also as a downward spiral without hope of dialectical melioration, let alone dialectical redemption. It has been contended that Byron’s acquaintance with the cosmic world view of Cuvier, as well as his acquaintance with Herschel’s new stellar discoveries, imbued him with a sense of the immensity of nature that enabled him to begin to control his passions and assuage his revolt.1060 But Byron’s growing awareness of immensity confirmed, rather than attenuated, his sceptical suspicions concerning the vanity of human efforts. The frequency of his proud complaints over increasing depression and melancholy shows that his final resignation was bitter 1056 Byron, Don Juan, 9. 37. 1–8. Also cf. Byron’s Preface to Cain, 1821, ed. Truman Guy Steffan, Austin and London 1968, 157. 1057 Byron, Don Juan, 9. 38. 6–8. Also cf. the Byronic hero-speaker’s fist-shaking at and braving of time’s irresistible tyranny in Byron’s poem To Time, lines 33–40 : One scene even thou canst not deform; The limit of thy sloth or speed When future wanderers bear the storm Which we shall sleep too sound to heed: And I can smile to think how weak Thine efforts shortly shall be shown, When all the vengeance thou canst wreak Must fall upon – a nameless stone. 1058 Byron, Cain, II/2, 80–84. 1059 Ibid. II/2, 220–7. 1060 Manfred Eimer, Byron und der Kosmos, Heidelberg 1912.

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rather than serene.1061 Nothing of “Zuversicht, Hoffnung und tröstlicher Versenkung in die Schönheit und Unendlichkeit der Schöpfung”1062 had arisen in him when he died over the composition of Don Juan. Nothing had changed since January 1821, when, on reading of a case of murder in which a grocer in Tunbridge had sold poisoned bacon wrapped up in a leaf of Richardson’s Pamela, he had written in his diary : What would Richardson, the vainest and luckiest of living authors (i. e. while alive) – […] what would he have said, could he have traced his pages from their place on the French prince’s toilets (see Boswell’s Johnson) to the grocer’s counter and the gipsymurderess’ bacon!!! What would he have said? What can any body say, save what Solomon said long before us?1063

Again, the reference is to the Book of Koheleth’s cyclical concept of history : “[…] vanity of vanities, all is vanity […] One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth forever” (Ecclesiastes 1, 2–4). Byron thus wrote in spite of his awareness of the vanity of seeking glory and immortality in art,1064 just as he loved and fought in spite of his awareness of the vanity and dangers of love and war. Thus, the Romantic Disillusionists demoralized themselves, suspecting that their literary efforts would serve no progress without simultaneous regression into hatred, war, and oblivion. They surmised that, like soldiers on the battlefield in a war of liberation, their campaigns against political, philosophical, and moral tyranny were losing battles. Their satirical weapons might outlive them for a while, but they were enfants perdus ultimately doomed finally to fall when their vainly aspiring hearts died from disillusion and exhaustion. Heine’s late poem 1061 E. g. Byron, Detached Thoughts, Nos 73, 74, 104 (1821), especially No 104, where he claims the authorities of Aristotle and Plutarch for his opinion ”that in general great Geniuses are of a melancholy turn” and continues (in : Letters and Journals, IX. 47): “Of my Genius – I can say nothing, but of my melancholy that it is ‘increasing & ought to be diminished’ but how ?” For the benefit of his ease and comfort, Byron sneered, he would rather have had it the other way round, the saturnine younger Sheridan for dinner, the pleasant Colman for supper (Detached Thoughts, No 107, ed. cit. IX. 48). His dark character and dark times would not allow him that melioristic luxury. 1062 Eimer, 201. 1063 Byron, Ravenna Journal, 4 January 1821, VIII. 11–12. 1064 For Byron’s thirst of glory see Lady Blessington, Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. cit. 222: “Byron had so unquenchable a thirst for celebrity that no means were left untried that might attain it: this frequently led to his expressing opinions totally at variance with his actions and real sentiments, and vice versa, and made him appear quite inconsistent and puerile. There was no sort of celebrity that he did not, at some period or other, condescend to seek, and he was not over nice in the means, provided he obtained the end.” For Byron’s exposition of the transience of literary fame in his controversy with Bowles on Pope see Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, II. 123–124.

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“Enfant perdu” (1851), often called his poetical testament, is Byronic in its awareness of ultimate death and failure, beginning and ending on a note of a never-ending war never to be won: Verlorner Posten in dem Freiheitskriege, Hielt ich seit dreißig Jahren treulich aus. Ich kämpfte ohne Hoffnung, daß ich siege, Ich wußte, nie komm ich gesund nach Haus. […] Ein Posten ist vakant! – Die Wunden klaffen – Der eine fällt, die andern rücken nach – Doch fall ich unbesiegt, und meine Waffen Sind nicht gebrochen – Nur mein Herze brach.1065

Again, Thomas De Quincey proved to be a disciple of Byron’s Romantic Disillusionism when, in “The English Mail-Coach” (1849), he shocked the conservative Victorian readers of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine by making an implicit denial of all historical progress. With its brutal strength and reckless speed, and with its commitment to a strict schedule in the interest of British supremacy and imperialism, the mail-coach is a symbol of history. Both the mail coach and history are centrifugal, wild, paying little regard to endangered individuals; and the organizer of the schedule has as little control over the system as the speed-addicted coachman has over an individual coach with its often bolting horses. Imagery of warfare and martial aggression pervades the whole essay. There is no natural harmony to which the “Tumultuosissimamente”1066 of the chaos of mail-coaches might easily return, so that the “central intellect” controlling that chaos into a schedule is compared to a conductor of a mighty orchestra artificially synchronizing a thousand instruments “disregarding each other”.1067 Human nature will be human nature, antithetically mixed and contradictory, and a revolution in the mail-coach hierarchy, with the young ones inside and the old establishment on top of the coach, would make no difference. Man’s animalistic nature would still make him enjoy reckless speed and danger, obey tyrannical orders, risk accidents, and allow himself to be carried away by the sweep of history, wherever it may take him. One of De Quincey’s undatable manuscripts in the Wordsworth Library, Grasmere, takes a critical look through an imaginary telescope backward (and then again forward) into history, concluding that the notion of “human progress” is a mere illusion and sense con1065 Heine, Romanzero, II, Lamentationen Lazarus, XX Enfant perdu, 1851, stanzas 1 and 6, in: Sämtliche Schriften, VI. I. 120–121. For the sceptical, anti-Faustian nature of the poem see H. M. Jones, Revolution and Romanticism, 438–439. 1066 De Quincey, The English Mail Coach, The Vision of Sudden Death, 1849, in: Works, ed. cit. XVI. 443. 1067 Ibid. XVI. 409.

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struction. In historical reality, progress is “so invisible as to elude all observation”, “like the progress of some nothing to something”.1068

1068 De Quincey, [On Human Progress], ed. cit. XX. 403.

IV

The Injustice of the World

The two Foscari, father and son, have much in common. The old doge, nominally a duce, or leader, is in reality a slave and prisoner of his own state, like his unfortunate son. Both are weak and helpless, in government as well as jurisdiction, symbolized by their physical condition: one exhausted by old age and the other by torture. The old doge, who must sentence his son for his own “sins”, knows that there never was, nor ever will be, justice in Venice, which is a Byronic chiffre for the world as a whole: And when we think we lead, we are most led, And still towards death, a thing which comes as much Without our act or choice, as birth, so that Methinks we must have sinn’d in some old world, And this is hell: the best is, that it is not Eternal.1069

In his state of excitement and confusion the old doge will not fully relinquish the idea of justice, although he is aware of its futility. If, as Byron repeatedly suggested, we have projected our wishful thinking (a benign creator and paradise) into a non-existent metaphysical state above, nominally called “heaven”, then we have also exorcised and ostracized the chaotic realities of our human condition (pain and weakness and injustice) into an equally non-existent metaphysical state below, nominally called “hell”. The idea was to become a commonplace in Decadent and Fin-de-SiHcle literature. When Arnold accuses the Devil of having tempted and lured him into an infernal contract in Byron’s The Deformed Transformed, the Mephistophelic answer is both negative and necessitarian. Temptation by the devil is merely a pious lie and excuse for man’s own immanent will. Man can pray for peace but will never find it as long as he lives. A slave to his passions, he cannot choose but to become guilty and be punished by his Creator for what that Creator himself 1069 Byron, The Two Foscari, 1821, II/1, 361–366.

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ordained him to be and do. As such, Byron modelled Arnold on Frankenstein’s Monster – both misshapen creatures bound by necessity to become evil in a world created as inherently corrupt. The Monster and Arnold must stain their hands with blood, and both resistance and repentance are useless rebellions against the real villain: their unjust Creator or Modern Prometheus. This explains Byron’s inversion of Goethe. Where the spoiler’s art of Goethe’s protean Devil Mephistopheles is both witty and mendaciously misleading, the spoiler’s art of Byron’s protean Devil Caesar is both witty and truthfully disillusioning. As opposed to traditional Christian demonology, which defined the devil as the king of lies, Byronic demonology defines the devil as the king of truth (or at least truthful doubt): From the star To the winding worm, all life is motion; and In life commotion is the extremest point Of life. The planet wheels till it becomes A comet, and destroying as it sweeps The stars, goes out. The poor worm winds its way, Living upon the death of other things, But still, like them, must live and die, the subject Of something which has made it live and die. You must obey what all obey, the rule Of fix’d Necessity : against her edict Rebellion prospers not.1070

In this view supported by the drama’s plot, man is the helpless agent of a cosmic circle of life, murder, and death, and the victim of cosmic injustice. Life is nothing but motion without aim, vitality and beauty are nothing but masks of disease and deformity, and the common grave is all life’s final destination, irrespective of vice or virtue in a totally amoral universe. Caesar the Devil is Byron’s spokesman, a poet of Romantic Disillusionism using Byron’s technique of bubble-pricking: When the merry bells are ringing And the Peasant Girls are singing And the early flowers are flinging Their odours in the air – And the honey bee is clinging To the buds, and birds are winging Their way – pair by pair : – Then the earth looks free from trouble With the brightness of a bubble Though I did not make it 1070 Byron, The Deformed Transformed, I/2, 22–33.

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I could breathe on and break it – But too much I scorn it Or else I would mourn it – To see despots and Slaves Playing o’er their own graves –1071

Arnold’s doppelganger Caesar is a puppet-devil, though more philosophical and less active than Arimanes, the evil spirit of Persian mythology in Byron’s Manfred (1817). Arimanes is the enemy yet also the agent of God – the puppeteer of men is himself puppeteered by a deity in an oppressive, punitive theology that perverts all justice.1072 He incorporates the principle of unjust divine retribution for yielding to the dictates of divinely created human nature. Manfred could not help but love his Astarte against all social and moral conventions, causing her death as a victim of l’amour fatal. The heterogeneity of human nature meant he loved and killed her, contrary to all logic of will and action. The guiltless crime, for which he is punished with unremitting pangs of conscience, resembles that of Pausanias – who killed his paramour Cleonice – and of Karel Hynek M#cha’s Byronic hero Vil8m – who killed his father1073 – both in fateful errors. Like many Byronic heroes Manfred is tortured by Nemesis and the Destinies as long as he lives, and it is only in the hour of death, stepping out of time, that he can shake off internalized, traditional morality and gain the stature of Byron’s Prometheus. His proud, disdainful refusal to accept a contract with the powers of Hell and with the powers of Heaven raises him above Goethe’s Faust (at least in Nietzsche’s reading of Goethe). Nevertheless, his Prometheanism results in real, punitive pangs of conscience that time could not heal, which were worse than the imagined tortures of an imagined hell – a myth illustrating the painful chaos within ourselves.1074 Placed between the Abbot and the Spirit, the dying Manfred in his Gothic tower in the Alps has the profound insight that man’s Blakean mind-forged manacles can be broken in the final oblivion of death alone: Thou hast no power upon me, that I feel; Thou never shalt possess me, that I know : What I have done is done; I bear within A torture which could nothing gain from thine: The mind which is immortal makes itself Requital for its good or evil thoughts –1075

1071 Ibid. III/Text of a Fragment, in: Complete Poetical Works, VI. 574. 1072 M. Priestman, Romantic Atheism, 240. Also see D. Arendt, Der “poetische Nihilismus” in der Romantik, II. 521. 1073 M#cha, M#j (1836). 1074 Byron, Manfred, I/1, 250–251. 1075 Ibid. III/4, 125–130.

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Man can thus escape the tyranny and injustice of God, which holy men like the Abbot of St Maurice would justify in a constructed theodicy : “Old man! ’tis not so difficult to die!”1076 Like Byron’s Cain, Manfred cannot believe in the logic of a just, omnipotent, and benevolent God who had to bring evil into the world “Because evil only was the path to good”.1077 A sick animal healed is worse than an animal unhurt in a world without suffering. Absurd dialectical theodicy inscribes a purpose upon a purposeless world: Strange good, that must arise from out Its deadly opposite.1078

The other cause of Manfred’s and Cain’s suffering is their insight into this truth. The Tree of Knowledge has made man both mortal and miserable. If born to be seekers rather than epicures they must continue their search for the ultimate truth, although they know that, contrary to Plato’s doctrine, an increase in knowledge brings only an increase in misery. Their search follows a blind life force, or 8lan vital, in the words of Cain, […] an innate clinging, A loathsome and yet all invincible Instinct of life, which I abhor, as I Despise myself, yet cannot overcome – And so I live. Would I had never lived!1079

Having seen more truth than ordinary human beings cloaked in blindness or cowardice – more than Cain’s naive wife Adah or faint-hearted mother Eve – they become solitary and isolated from the rest of mankind, early literary manifestations of the grand abandonn8. Byron’s Manfred and Cain, as well as the ingenious narrator of Poe’s short story “A Descent into the Maelstöm” (1841), are designed in literary perversion of the type of the Old Testament prophet who sees the uncomfortable truth at the bottom of the well of life, and will not be heard by people walking in darkness. Driven mad for truth in spite of their awareness of its lethal danger, they find themselves alone: A boat picked me up – exhausted from fatigue – and (now that the danger was removed) speechless from the memory of its horror. Those who drew me on board were my old mates and daily companions – but they knew me no more than they would have known a traveller from the spirit-land. My hair which had been raven-black the day before, was

1076 1077 1078 1079

Ibid. III/4, 151. Byron, Cain, II/2, 287–288. Ibid. II/2, 280–299. Ibid. I/1, 111–115.

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as white as you see it now. They say too that the whole expression of my countenance had changed. I told them my story. They did not believe it.1080

Absurdly constituted like Poe’s narrator – split between instinct and insight – Manfred is the prototype for what the abbreviation of his name in printed text signalizes: Man. – and especially cultivated man after the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Enlightenment – and the poet in particular.1081 Doomed by his incarcerated soul to search for Heaven and truth, he finds only Hell both within and without himself. Manfred cannot remain content with the orthodoxy of the Abbot and the Chamois Hunter any more than Cain with the orthodoxy of Abel and his parents Adam and Eve, although Manfred is more humane in not attempting to destroy happy ignorance. What distinguishes Manfred from his literary model, Dr Faustus, is the fact that his philosophical search is not punished by a just God as an overreacher’s sinful act of hubris in a moral universe, but that it is the quester’s self-destructive discovery of the amorality and absurdity of the created universe, which in Joseph Conrad’s later novels leads Kurtz and the French Lieutenant to their deaths. The reader approves of Manfred’s denying homage to the creators and operators of such a universe, both in his refusal to repent and confess to God and in his refusal to bend his knee to Arimanes. As such, Manfred is the model for Grabbe’s Byronic hero Theodor von Gothland who, horrified and maddened by his insight into the world’s absurdity, killed what he loved and refuses to repent a sinful act that divine injustice compelled him to commit: Denn nimmer kann Ich eine Tat bereun, die durch Mein feindliches Geschick und nicht durch mich vollbracht ist!1082

Pride, the radix malorum of Christian theology, is the Byronic hero’s only weapon for self-defence. Whoever has the drive and time to penetrate that inner truth of the world’s absurdity will experience “The horror!”1083 Manfred has come to realize that “The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life”,1084 and the Spirits and Destinies confirm his experience “That knowledge is not happiness”.1085 Byron, Heine, and Leopardi agreed that such dismantling of illusions and af-

1080 Poe, Tales of Mystery and Imagination, A Descent into the Maelström, 1841, in: Collected Works, II. 594. 1081 Goetsch, Monsters in English Literature: From the Enlightenment to the First World War, Frankfurt am Main and New York 2002, passim. 1082 Grabbe, Herzog Theodor von Gothland, 1827, III/1, in: Werke, I. 81. 1083 Kurtz’s dying words in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899, 1902). 1084 Byron, Manfred, I/1, 12. 1085 Ibid. II/4, 61.

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firmative myths revealed bleak, uncomfortable truths, “l’acerbo vero” and “l’infausta verit/”.1086 Cain’s rebellious reproach to his pious parents that they might have braved the Almighty Tyrant by tasting of the Tree of Life before the Tree of Knowledge, is another pseudo-midrashic, deconstructive rereading of the biblical myth of Paradise Lost. Cain will not be content with his parents’ (and the ancien r8gime’s) call to peace, “Content thee with what is!”, and their God’s assurance that his yoke is easy and his burden light.1087 His feeling, which is confirmed by Lucifer, is that these are stratagems to cheat him of his birthright: that being a better life from his Creator’s hand. He sees his little sleeping child’s dreams of innocence, and he foresees his awakening and ageing to experience of destruction and death, though without Blake’s redeeming vision of Paradise Regained. It is reminiscent of Byron’s aforequoted early poem “I Would I Were A Careless Child” (1808), whose speaker lamented his childhood’s “visionary scene of bliss” to have been a mere “splendid dream” from which he had cruelly awakened to the “Truth” of misery and loneliness.1088 Cains rebellious act of the murder of his brother Abel anticipates the revolutionary populace’s murder of all those who revere, and thus support, divine and human injustice and tyranny. Byron’s poetic drama, ironically subtitled “a mystery”, thus discredits the theodicy and soteriology of medieval mystery plays. What was once a literary genre in the service of confirmation has becomes its contrary in the service of subversion. It discredits all theology with its revelation of the world’s discontinuity and contradictions. Lucifer is both an enlightener and liar, the benefactor and the destroyer of Cain, who is his easy victim. Initially, Cain is a bourgeois yet searching and intelligent paterfamilias whom Lucifer turns into a moral monster. As such, Byron’s Cain can be seen as a representative of post-Enlightenment man, and the mark branded upon him as both a stigma and distinction.1089 Byron’s Eve is not the femme fatale of traditional biblical interpretation who brought death upon the world. She is instead a woman as intelligent and clearsighted as her son, though cowardly and comfort-orientated in her relapse from painful insight to pious adoration and submission. Quite incapable of not stealing the apple, woman is the same victim of divine tyranny as man; both being created as to be incapable of withstanding their natural, amorous instincts – the anthropology of the Baron d’Holbach and the Marquis de Sade. Creation appears as a sadistic and arbitrary act of revolt-breeding injustice, just as in Byron’s parallel poetic drama Heaven and Earth, where the Chorus of Mortals 1086 1087 1088 1089

Fabbroni – Nisbet, Heinrich Heine and Giacomo Leopardi: The Rhetoric of Midrash, 99. Byron, Cain, 1821, I/1, 45–49. Byron, Poems Original and Translated, 1808, 21–32. Goetsch, Monsters in English Literature, 119–125.

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disavows a malign God who will not even listen to the pleas of his innocent and precondemned victims: If he hath made earth, let it be his shame To make a world for torture.1090

Cain the Byronic hero’s first soliloquy at the beginning of Byron’s poetic drama states the problem. Called upon to offer thanksgiving and sacrifice to God for his toilsome existence, Cain objects that he neither asked for it nor wants it. God’s “will”1091 impelled it, and God’s omnipotent “will” can be tyrannical, rather than good. The toil of life is an unjust inheritance that no man can renounce, ruthlessly passed on and on from the Heavenly Father to earthly fathers to sons: And this is Life! – Toil! and wherefore should I toil? – because My father could not keep his place in Eden. What had I done in this? – I was unborn, I sought not to be born; nor love the state To which that birth hath brought me. […] […] Because He is all-powerful, must all-good, too, follow? I judge but by the fruits – and they are bitter – Which I must feed on for a fault not mine.1092

In his philosophy Schopenhauer offered an interpretation of this biblical myth in terms of the nineteenth-century understanding of myths as fictionalizations of real or imagined truths. Schopenhauer made use of the double meaning of German “Schuld” as both legal debt and personal guilt. Man, the creature and victim of “will”, cannot renounce the legal debt (“Schuld”) of his unrequested inheritance, so he constructs a myth of personal guilt (“Schuld”) in order to make that unjust inheritance more purposeful and bearable. He “wills” to live on and toil, driven by his innate sexual instincts, although he knows that all the toil of his life cannot pay off the inherited mortgage, except in the hour of death: Auf Abzahlung dieser Schuld wird, in der Regel, die ganze Lebenszeit verwendet: doch sind damit erst die Zinsen getilgt. Die Kapitalabzahlung geschieht durch den Tod. – Und wann wurde diese Schuld kontrahirt? – Bei der Zeugung.1093

In the context of this rereading of biblical myth as a fictionalization of the injustice of the world – personal punishment without personal crime – Scho1090 1091 1092 1093

Byron, Heaven and Earth, 3. 862–863. Byron, Cain, I/1, 75. Ibid. I/1, 64–69 and 76–79. Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, ed. cit. II. 770.

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penhauer quotes Byron’s famous lament on the false nature (i. e. miscarriage and misconstruction) of life: Our life is a false nature – ’tis not in The harmony of things, – this hard decree, This uneradicable taint of sin, This boundless upas, this all-blasting tree, Whose root is earth, whose leaves and branches be The skies which rain their plagues on men like dew – Disease, death, bondage – all the woes we see – And worse, the woes we see not – which throb through The immedicable soul, with heart-aches ever new.1094

Death is the redemption of the individual, but not of the tortured species that must follow its “will”, or life force. This radical denial of all soteriology coincides with what Byron’s Lucifer teaches Cain in Byron’s rereading of the biblical myth: that the death of the body provides neither relief nor redemption and that even spirits like Lucifer himself, after his fall, must carry on living and suffering – the debt of all created and fallen beings. The guilt is hence the Creator’s; the debt the creature’s. Baudelaire’s view that the “fall” and “original sin” were not committed by Adam and Eve, but by the Creator and Father of All Things in his unjust creation of the world was a logical conclusion from Byron’s and Schopenhauer’s premises. And it may also be owed to De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822), the major source of Baudelaire’s Les paradis artificiels (1860), where De Quincey denied his personal guilt and staged himself as a victim of circumstance and necessity rather than a rational, homogeneously constructed creature capable of free choice under a free will. The work’s title is an ironic allusion to a religious penitential practice, because “confession” here rather means “apology” of a whole class of the human creation: Guilt and misery shrink, by a natural instinct, from public notice […] Guilt, therefore, I do not acknowledge: and, if I did, it is possible that I might still resolve on the present act of confession, in consideration of the service which I may thereby render to the whole class of opium-eaters.1095

Here again, Byron stood at the beginning of this line of nineteenth-century philosophy of genetic heredity. His verse tales and plays insistently fictionalize the Creator’s injustice to his creatures by the analogy of the injustice of fathers to their sons, or kings to their subjects, punishing them for the very crimes which were made their inescapable inheritance. Cain, the Byronic hero, is aware of the fact that his father Adam cursed him even before his birth in daring to pluck the 1094 Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 4. 126. 1–9. The “upas” means the poisonous Tree of Knowledge. Quoted by Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, ed. cit. II. 765. 1095 De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, in: Works, II. 10.

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forbidden fruit, and that he will pass the curse on to his children and their whole human progeny : “I leave them my inheritance”.1096 Lucifer also confirms the injustice of Cain’s and all mankind’s curse for a father’s trespass, personal punishment and suffering without personal choice and guilt. Cain, who thirsts for good and happiness, is still condemned to evil acts and grow miserable,1097 much like Frankenstein’s Monster. The creature of a bloodthirsty God and Ultimate Father, who created man in his own image, must be bloodthirsty himself, though God’s cruelty by far surpasses Cain’s. Cain murders his pious brother Abel in a dispute over the appropriateness of blood-sacrifice to his unjust Creator, still ignorant of the causes and symptoms of death. It is doubly unjust that the Creator sends his Angel to punish Cain and all his human posterity both for his genetic inheritance and for “he knew not what He did”.1098 Neither does the Creator accept poor Cain’s offer of repentance and atonement. The Angel’s apodictic words “what is done is done”, precluding mankind’s salvation,1099 also preconfirm both Swinburne’s rebellion against “The gods that constrain us and curse”1100 and a central doctrine of twentieth-century existentialist philosophy. In Byron’s and Mary Shelley’s wake, Lermontov created his Demon, a Cherub fallen upon the earth, doomed to become evil due to his exile (YXT^Q^kp) having been expelled and forsaken by his Creator. Illusions of a lasting paradise disillusioned by daily terrestrial experience mean that the Demon develops an ennui that only excesses of vice can temporarily ward off – the very personal experience of Byron, Musset, Lermontov, Baudelaire, and the later Decadent poets of the Fin de SiHcle. His confession of his “sins” to his beloved Tamara is a key to the understanding of Romantic Disillusionist protests against the injustice of the world’s indifferent or sadistic Divine Creator, especially as he shares Frankenstein’s Monster’s bitter experience that love provides no salvation and repentance remains without effect in this misconstructed world: Thus in the elemental strife I sought to stimulate a life Of dull monotony, and numb Thoughts that like guest unbidden come, The voice of conscience never dumb.1101

Similarly, Musset’s Octave repents his past life of debauchery and vows moral reformation in his love for Brigitte Pearson, yet finds it impossible to abandon 1096 Byron, Cain, II/2, 23–29. 1097 Ibid. II/2, 238–241. 1098 Ibid. III/1, 319–320. In this unheard prayer to God to forgive his brother, Abel shows more justice and compassion than his cruel Creator. 1099 Ibid. III/1, 516. The Angel’s refusal is the drama’s concluding speech. 1100 Swinburne, Poems and Ballads, Dolores, 1866, line 148, in: Complete Works, I. 288. 1101 Lermontov, 5V]_^, MS 1829–41, publ. 1856, transl. cit. X.

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his old ways because both his nature and fate will not allow such a turn to bourgeois decency. He, the first-person narrator, is not really guilty of the havoc that he causes – a glaring injustice and inconsistency of nature pointed out in his exclamatory style: Faire le mal! tel 8tait donc le rile que la Providence m’avait impos8! Moi, faire le mal! moi / qui ma conscience, au milieu de mes fureurs mÞmes, disait pourtant que j’8tais bon! moi qu’une destin8e impitoyable entra%nait sans cesse plus avant dans un ab%me oF je tombais!1102

Grillparzer’s Jaromir, inadvertent captain of robbers who commits parricide by pure chance, tries to overcome this dawning insight by negating the evident truth of the world’s radical contingency and professing a conventional belief in a benevolent, divine guidance and purpose of all suffering. His short-lived, passionate creed pitched against the evident injustice of fate, which punishes men for deeds decreed by itself, amounts to a bitterly ironic discrediting of Christian doctrine: Nein, in jenen düstern Fernen Waltet keine blinde Macht, Über Sonnen, über Sternen Ist ein Vateraug, das wacht. Keine finstern Mächte raten Blutig über unsre Taten, Sie sind keines Zufalls Spiel; Nein, ein Gott, ob wirs gleich leugnen, Führt sie, wenn auch nicht zum eignen, Immer doch zum guten Ziel.1103

By contrast to such theodicy, the truth of the tragedy’s plot is cruelly evident and simple: Unsre Taten sind nur Würfe In des Zufalls blinde Nacht.1104

The echoes from Byron’s indictments of the world’s injustice attest to Musset’s and Grillparzer’s neopagan Byronism, as Musset and Grillparzer polemically set a modern concept of contingency (rather than the Classical Greek concept of fate) against Christian concepts of salvation. Cain’s, as well as his Manfred’s, feeling of personal guilt in spite of the knowledge of the lack of it is simply another symptom of man’s illogically split nature, a bungling or hoaxing Cre1102 Musset, Confession d’un enfant du siHcle, 1836, part 5, chapter 6, in: Œuvres complHtes en prose, ed. cit. 273–274. 1103 Grillparzer, Die Ahnfrau, V, 1817, in: Werke, I. 94–95. 1104 Ibid. I. 94.

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ator’s misconstruction. God the Almighty Tyrant and his self-proclaimed representatives on earth – the monarchs and princes of the restored ancien r8gime, all “fathers of the peoples” – punish their creatures for what they themselves have made incumbent upon them: to commit illegal acts of love or war.1105 When, in Byron’s Romantic verse-tale Parisina (1816), Azo sentences his bastard son Hugo to die on the block for his secret love of his stepmother, the titular heroine, the reader is informed that Hugo has committed the same “crime” as his father and judge Azo had before him, because love is the genetically inescapable “crime” (i. e. negative inheritance) of all mankind. Hugo’s conduct is not only inherited from his father Azo as Ulric’s is from his father Werner and his deceased grandfather,1106 but always has been and will be the permanent, irredeemable inheritance of all mankind. All are criminals, guilty in the eyes of the law, but not in terms of personal responsibility. Hugo’s love for Parisina could not be withstood any more than the Giaour’s fatal love for Leila, as […] love will find its way Through paths where wolves would fear to prey.1107

Werner Siegendorf could also not withstand the temptation to plunder his archenemy Stralenheim’s gold, nor his son, Ulric Siegendorf, to murder Stralenheim when need and occasion demanded the dishonourable deed, and both accessed the same secret passage in the same dilapidated Gothic castle. Throughout the play father and son are presented as each other’s doppelganger in irresistible passion, exchanging roles and speeches until their final common “fall” into hopelessness and primordial chaos: Ulric! – Ulric! – there are crimes Made venial by the occasion, and temptations Which nature cannot master or forbear.1108

The same judicial injustice shapes the relationship of “divinely ordained” sovereigns to their subjects, metaphorically described as fathers and mothers of their peoples to instil feelings of natural gratitude and obedience.1109 In The Lament of Tasso it is the prince, Duke Alfonso of Ferrara – God’s self-proclaimed 1105 Byron, Parisina (1816), Werner (1822), The Two Foscari (1821). 1106 Byron, Werner, I/1, 96–98: […] but Heaven seems To claim her stern prerogative, and visit Upon my boy his father’s faults and follies. 1107 Byron, The Giaour, 1813, lines 1048–1049. 1108 Byron, Werner, II/2, 147–149. Cf. V/1, 339–344. 1109 See the interaction theory of metaphor, stressing the ideological nature of the choice of a vehicle to illustrate a tenor ; H. Münkler, Politische Bilder, Politik der Metaphern, Frankfurt am Main 1994.

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representative and father to his children-subjects – who unjustly punishes the poet for loving his sister Leonora. That punishment first involves a contortion of justice, falsely imputing the poet with madness distinct from all mankind’s in a madhouse world, second makes use of mendacious censorship by declaring his valuable thoughts as dangerous, and third pronounces a sentence of guilt upon a lover who could not choose but to love. Madness and love are ingredients of the human condition, Alfonso’s as well as Tasso’s: I was indeed delirious in my heart To lift my love so lofty as thou art; […] That thou wert beautiful, and I not blind, Hath been the sin which shuts me from mankind.1110

As also in James Thomson B.V.’s later dramatic monologue modelled on Byron’s, “Tasso to Leonora” (1856), love and marriage, Positive Romanticism’s symbols of the fallen world’s destined reintegration, have become instruments of its further fall and laceration, underscored by Tasso’s rising doubts and threatening madness: Why in this furnace is my spirit proved Like steel in tempering fire? because I loved? Because I loved what not to love, and see, Was more or less than mortal, and than me.1111

This accusation of the irredeemable world’s constitutional injustice recurs in the tragicomic context of Don Juan. In Seville, Juan’s pious Roman Catholic parents each have adulterous love affairs that would expose them to criminal persecution and social ostracism. Donna Inez, the hypocritical mother who reveals her son’s love affair with Donna Julia in order to marry her paramour, Donna Julia’s rich husband Alfonso, is not so much revolting for her adultery as for her greed, hypocrisy, and gross parental injustice. Besides divorcing her genuinely adulterous husband Don Jos8, she banishes her son Juan for the same transgression that is her own crime to illegally disinherit him in her own financial interest. Her unjust act is the cause of all her son’s ensuing misfortunes. The narrator’s comment places father, mother, and son in the same genetic heritage of Adam, Eve, and the stolen apple, with an additional heresy in his deconstructive reinterpretation of felix culpa, or the Fortunate Fall of dialectical theodicy. The Fall redeemed mankind from eternal paradisiacal boredom: Perfect she was, but as perfection is Insipid in this naughty world of ours, 1110 Byron, The Lament of Tasso, 1817, 2. 50–56. 1111 Ibid. 8. 204–207.

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Where our first parents never learn’d to kiss Till they were exiled from their earlier bowers, Where all was peace, and innocence, and bliss, (I wonder how they got through the twelve hours) Don Jos8, like a lineal son of Eve, Went plucking various fruit without her leave.1112

In short, the Seville episode may be read as a fictional illustration of the Schopenhauerian truth that the sexual drive is beyond human control, in a philosophy exactly contemporary with Byron’s fiction. Byron’s irony corresponds to his indictment of (equally inescapable) hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is man’s and woman’s indispensable bulwark to shield themselves against social indictment for being caught following their instincts. The malevolent Creator has sent his creatures as they are into a world dominated by things as they are: sexual politics forbidding free love, codes of honour demanding revenge, property ownership breeding greed, and laws exacting punishments for transgressions. Genetic and social factors thus concur to make men unhappy. Byron knew Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein because he had been present at its first reading at the Villa Diodati in the stormy summer of 1816, being part of a Gothic novel competition held with the two Shelleys after readings of German ghost stories in French translation and discussions on the nature of man. William Godwin, Mary Shelley’s father, had taught that naturally good creatures are corrupted by the non-egalitarian constitution of society and its false moral standards and privileges, and that a return to “political justice” would restore man’s goodness and happiness.1113 Mary and Byron contested such a dialectical view of history and progress. Unlike Godwin’s and Percy Shelley’s optimistic necessitarianism, Byron’s determinism was sceptical and profoundly pessimistic, assuming the existence of irreparable genetic as well as irreparable social necessities.1114 His pessimistic deism is echoed in the heretically ironic prayer with which Fitzgerald’s sceptic Omar Khayy#m addresses God: Oh Thou, who didst with Pitfall and with Gin Beset the Road I was to wander in, Thou wilt not with Predestination round Enmesh me, and impute my Fall to Sin?1115

1112 Byron, Don Juan, 1. 18. 1–8; cf. ibid. 2. 179. 1–8. 1113 Godwin, An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Political Justice, and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness, 2 vols., London, 1793. Also see Rolf Lessenich, Aspects of English Preromanticism, Cologne and Vienna 1989, 414–428. 1114 Hence it is misleading to call Byron a necessitarian; see P.B. Shelley’s definition of “the doctrine of Necessity” in his note to Queen Mab, 1813, VI. 198, 809–812. 1115 Fitzgerald, Rub#iy#t of Omar Khayy#m, stanza 80 (first edition), 264.

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It also finds its echo in the diary of Karl Gutzkow’s sceptical heroine Wally, a doubting believer who complains that God, in his half-revelation, demands obedience to his law without allowing man either full understanding or the means to obey : Denn warum haben wir halbe Vernunft, halbe Erkenntnis, halben Geist? Warum zu allem nur die Elemente? Und wir sind so vermessen und bauen auf diesen trüben Boden Systeme, welche den Schein der Vollendung tragen und uns mit Verpflichtungen willkürlich belasten!1116

Such literature and religion carry no consolation, let alone a lasting relief from the burdens of existence. Byron anticipates Schopenhauer in seeing the creation and contemplation of art as merely a temporary escape from the misery of existence rather than an anamnetic vision of Paradise Regained. His poets Tasso, in prison, and Dante, in exile, suffer the atrocious political injustice of their fates, resembling Byronic heroes in braving an earthly tyranny (though not imputing it to any archetypal divine tyranny). Both deliver their monologues after the completion of their greatest works: Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata and Dante’s Divina Commedia. Knowing their deaths are near, though temporarily conquered by their literary fame eclipsing and denigrating the fame of their equally mortal tyrannical oppressors, they look back on the bliss of artistic creation and forward to the misery of an irredeemable human history. Tasso triumphantly laments in a wild mixture of frequently broken heroic couplets: But thou, my young creation! my soul’s child! Which ever playing round me came and smiled, And wooed me from myself with thy sweet sight, Thou too art gone – and so is my delight!1117

and Dante triumphantly laments in imitated Dantesque terza rima: Once more in man’s frail world! which I had left So long that ’twas forgotten; and I feel The weight of clay again, – too soon bereft Of the immortal vision which could heal My earthly sorrows […]1118

Schopenhauer radicalized Byron’s Negative Romantic poetology insofar as he understood poetry as the lamentation of the species through the individual, thus denying the Positive Romantic concept both of individual and inspired lyrical poetry (“Bekenntnisdichtung”) and of individual and original genius (“Urge1116 Gutzkow, Wally, die Zweiflerin, 1835, ed. cit. 95. This is one of Wally’s diary entries. 1117 Byron, The Lament of Tasso, 1817, 2. 37–40. 1118 Byron, The Prophecy of Dante, 1821, 1. 1–4.

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nie”).1119 ^leqor, the yearning for and pain of love in poetry, expresses the species’ urge for procreation and does not arise from ephemeral individuals.1120 However, as in Petrarch and Positive Romanticism, melancholy and suffering are preconditions for artistic creation and poetic enjoyment, “dolci sospiri”, so they are in Byron, Leopardi, Nerval, and Schopenhauer. “Das Winseln der Gattung durch das Individuum” is both painful and enjoyable, though without any soteriological claims of lasting redemption through art. The disconsolate speaker of Nerval’s most famous sonnet, “El Desdichado” (1853), thus retains his lute and Orphic lyre, a symbol of his form-giving power, but is also aware both of the uselessness of his happier memories and of his drifting into final madness, chaos, and death. The sense of redemption by art had been sporadic and shortlived. The stress is on Orpheus’s and Apollo’s ultimate failure and madness in their frustrated loves, on the artist as grand abandonn8: Je suis le T8n8breux, – le Veuf, – l’Inconsol8, Le Prince d’Aquitaine / la Tour abolie: Ma seule Ptoile est morte, et mon luth constell8 Porte le Soleil noir de la M8lancholie. […] Et j’ai deux fois vainqueur travers8 l’Ach8ron: Modulant tour / tour sur la lyre d’Orph8e Les soupirs de la Sainte et les cris de la F8e.1121

Art is an anodyne which offers the deceptive consolation of temporary escape and temporary mnemosyne, but fragmentation, chaos, and injustice will remain – like the injustice throughout the whole world. In Schopenhauer’s terms, art alternatively allows man temporary relief from the Will to live – from his limited, desire-ridden subjectivity – but offers no solution to the problem of his senseless existence.1122 This has always been and always will be the case in Byron’s dramatic monologues of suffering artists, The Lament of Tasso (1817) and The Prophecy of Dante (1821), even after these poets’ prophetically foreseen liberation of Italy. Past tyrannical injustices – those of Duke Alfonso II of Ferrara confining Tasso for illegal, though irresistible, love of his sister Leonora, and of the Guelf party sending the Ghibelline Dante into exile from Florence for alle-

1119 Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, ed. cit. II. 733. 1120 Ibid. 731. 1121 Nerval, Les ChimHres, El Desdichado, lines 1–4 and 12–14, in: Œuvres, I. 3. Peter Cochran, From Pichot to Stendhal to Musset: Byron’s Progress through Early Nineteenth-Century French Literature, in: The Reception of Byron in Europe, I. 67–69, reads Nerval’s identityseeking speaker as a mixture of Byron and Byron’s Manfred. 1122 Christopher Janaway, Wills to Life: Schopenhauer’s Role in the Transition between Eighteenth- and Twentieth-Century Thought, in: TLS 5611, 15 October 2010, 16–17.

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giance to the other party1123 – are represented so as to include the modern tyrannical injustice of the post-Napoleonic sovereigns and party chiefs. Such simplifications of complex historical facts were a well-established technique of Classical Tradition Streitkultur with the aim of constructing clear frontlines and polemically applying experiences of history to one’s own time: […] The most infernal of all evils here, The sway of petty tyrants in a state; For such sway is not limited to kings, And demagogues yield to them but in date, As swept off sooner ; […] The faction Chief is but the Sultan’s brother, And the worst despot’s far less human ape.1124

Byron’s and Byronic Disillusionism’s distrust of party democracy as a truly free alternative to oppressive monarchy recurred in Büchner’s ingenious Danton, with his disbelief in the millennial vision and realizability of a truly democratic government fitting the people as closely as a garment. The restored police state’s successful attempt to instrumentalize art to allow a wide acceptance of political injustice increased the widening gap between the artist and art on the one hand and the bourgeois and life on the other, as expressed in Grillparzer’s tragedy Sappho (1818), one so highly esteemed by Byron. Sappho’s attempt to reconcile art and life by forcing her love upon Phaon ends in self-destruction – the modern poet Grillparzer’s ostensible break with Weimar Classicism though in Goethe’s and Schiller’s classical form.1125 Sappho’s devoted servant Rhamnes concludes the tragedy with a resigned farewell to the true artist, one spoken to an audience aware of the police state of Metternich and Lord Liverpool: Verwelkt der Lorbeer und das Saitenspiel verklungen! Es war auf Erden ihre Heimat nicht –1126

From Byron and Grillparzer on the exclusion of the artist as grand abandonn8 became a central theme in later Decadent poetry. Tasso, unjustly declared mad, and Dante, unjustly banished, are obviously alter ego personas of Byron himself. In view of the vanity of their admonitions, they doubly suffer : “Despair and 1123 Byron followed legend and Stofftradition rather than historical facts. The historical Tasso was hospitalized for delusions of persecution, and the historical Dante was a White Guelf exiled by the Black Guelfs. 1124 Byron, The Prophecy of Dante, 4. 118–121 and 126–127. 1125 Wolfgang Düsing, Künstlerproblematik und Kunstreligion in Grillparzers Sappho, in: Das Künstlerdrama als Spiegel ästhetischer und gesellschaftlicher Tendenzen, ed. Frank Göbler, Tübingen 2009, 87–106. 1126 Grillparzer, Sappho, 1818, V/6, in: Werke, ed. cit. I. 184.

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Genius are too oft connected”.1127 Moreover, their hard fate is, and will always be, that of Prometheus Bound. Their art, like all art, cheers mankind in its existential misery, so that even the tyrant and conqueror stops his obsessive and selftormenting course to delight in it. However, as Byron’s Dante laments, the poet’s unjust reward for irradiating the dark world with comforting light will always be that of Prometheus: For what is poesy but to create From overfeeling […] And be the new Prometheus of new men, Bestowing fire from heaven, and then, too late, Finding the pleasure given repaid with pain, And vultures to the heart of the bestower, Who, having lavish’d his high gift in vain, Lies chain’d to his lone rock by the sea-shore?1128

The case of another unjustly sentenced and tortured dramatic speaker, the Prisoner of Chillon (FranÅois de Bonnivard), is darker insofar as he has neither of the artists’ consolations nor their Promethean strength. Inhumanely imprisoned by a princely aristocrat (the Duke of Savoy) for his championing of Swiss liberty, Bonnivard’s mind declines quicker than Tasso’s.1129 Having lost both his father and three brothers, he was jailed, chained in the damp, dark dungeon of Chillon with two brothers, whose successive deaths and burials in his cell he had to experience. The ray of light proved a mere ignis fatuus, like the bird that visited and left him – both being false promises of redemption. When he speaks his metrically and psychically humble monologue at the moment of liberation, he has not only grown used to his dungeon, he has come to understand that the whole world is a dungeon for man: “And the whole earth would henceforth be A wider prison unto me”.1130 Even the views of rivers, torrents, and Alpine mountains cannot deceive him as to real human liberty because he has grown aware of nature’s indifference to human fate. He has also come to understand that sovereigns in that cruel, larger world of confinement will never extend the same Romantic tenderness and pity to the subjects at their mercy that he showed to the spiders and mice at his mercy in his cruel, smaller world of confinement. Bonnivard’s imprisonment in Chillon by the ancien-r8gime tyranny of the House of Savoy may be read as an allegory of the imprisonment of man in this world by the tyranny of Heaven, where man has accommodated 1127 Ibid. 4. 39. 1128 Byron, The Prophecy of Dante, 4. 11–19. 1129 For Tasso’s unavoidable decline of mind, in spite of his strength and faith in literary immorality, see Byron, The Lament of Tasso, 8. 189–203. 1130 Byron, The Prisoner of Chillon, 1816, 12. 322–323.

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himself as well as he can, dreaming of true liberty and true happiness that no dungeon can provide. The passage discredits Wordsworth and Coleridge, whose Positive Romanticism saw the integral love of all creatures as a hopefully realizable return to Paradise Regained: With spiders I had friendship made, And watch’d them in their sullen trade, Had seen the mice by moonlight play, And why should I feel less than they? We were all inmates of one place, And I, the monarch of each race, Had power to kill – yet, strange to tell! In quiet we had learn’d to dwell, Nor slew I of my subjects one, What Sovereign hath so little done?1131

The prisoner’s monologue thus gives the lie to Byron’s introductory “Sonnet on Chillon”, with its vain promise of the “chainless mind” and purposeful martyrdom in the cause of liberty. Byron’s art reproduces the shining and vanishing of meteors and will-o’-the-wisps in disillusioning his reader’s expectations. Later, Nietzsche was to draw a radical consequence from these Byronic premises: amor fati. It is wise to follow the example of Prometheus and accept one’s fate willingly and with dignity, rather than either to lament it or deceive oneself with a metaphysical philosophy (like the German Idealists called “Hinterweltler”),1132 a finalist and soteriological view of history (like the Christian theologians called “Erlösungsschwindler”), or with immoderate recourse to hedonism: ‘Schicksal, ich folge dir! Und wollt’ ich nicht, ich müsst’ es doch und unter Seufzen tun!’1133

Although an admirer of Byron since 1857 when he read Manfred and gave a lecture on Byron’s dramatic poetry, Nietzsche found fault with his (and Musset’s) lack of moderation and asceticism.1134 Byron, as well as Büchner and Grabbe, did not object to a Don Alfonso or Valerio or Don Juan, with their unreflected recourse to “wine and woman, mirth and laughter”. Much as they might have despised such thoughtless, bourgeois revellers, they welcomed their love of comfort and lack of thought, which was diametrically opposed to Faust’s 1131 Ibid. 14. 381–390. 1132 Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, 1883–1885, VI. I. 31–34. 1133 Nietzsche, Morgenröte, 1881, Aph. 195, V. 1. 168. Nietzsche here quotes himself, possibly from his earlier translation of Aeschylus, Prometheus Desmotes. 1134 Pointner – Geisenhanslüke, The Reception of Byron in the German-Speaking Lands, in: The Reception of Byron in Europe, II. 266–268.

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idealism and yearning for worlds beyond the empirical. The same applies to Byron’s portrayal of the thoughtless and revelling Count Sigismund, who could enjoy his life in contrast to his son, the self-torturing philosopher Manfred.1135 Aristippus and Epicurus had taught this hedonism just as, before them, had Sardanapalus, the last king of Assyria. Hedonism would prove much more practicable than Platonism, albeit still no safeguard against the ills of life nor an escape from the human condition, hence Byron’s narrator’s heretical eulogium on the free and thoughtless love of Haid8e and Don Juan: Thou mak’st philosophers; there’s Epicurus And Aristippus, a material crew ; Who to immoral courses would allure us By theories quite practicable too; If only from the devil they would insure us, How pleasant were the maxim, (not quite new) ‘Eat, drink, and love, what can the rest avail us?’ So said the royal sage Sardanapalus.1136

The narrator of Pushkin’s Evgeny Onegin shares this view of his model, the narrator of Byron’s Don Juan. As an intellectual he still has vain hopes, but as a former visionary whom experience has cut down to size, he calls upon his readers to drink and enjoy rather than think and hope: Meanwhile enjoy, friends, till it’s ended This light existence, every dram! Its nullity I’ve comprehended And little bound to it I am; I’ve shut my eyelids now to phantoms; But distant hopes appear […]1137

In his own elegiac Child Harold written in the private mental asylum at Epping Forest (MS ca 1840–1841) and inscribed on Byron’s Childe Harold, with a significant orthographic variant stressing the irrecoverable loss of childhood, John Clare’s mix of complaint and exultation over the loss of an artist’s sensibility followed Byron’s. Confined in a “madhouse” with a life that “hath been one chain of contradictions”, Clare’s speaker sees the whole world as a madhouse where “there exists no law”.1138 Positive Romantic sensibility has turned from a prophet-poet’s special gift to a reality-poet’s life burden, exposing him to life’s cruelty so that he can intensely feel his confinement and torture himself with 1135 Byron, Manfred, III/3, 19–25. 1136 Byron, Don Juan, 2. 207. 1–8. Cf. Heinrich Heine’s positive view of Sancho Panza as opposed to Don Quijote, in: Die romantische Schule, 1836, in: Sämtliche Werke, III. 431. 1137 Pushkin, Evgeny Onegin, chapter II, stanza 39, lines 1–6, transl. cit. 53. 1138 Clare, Child Harold, lines 146 and 160, in: Later Poems 1837–1864, ed. cit. I. 45–46.

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vain dreams of love and liberty. Keats’s desire like a nightingale to fly away “on the viewless wings of Poesy” has become a Negative Romantic nightmare. As in Clare’s later poetry in general, there is an absurdly repeated Byronic cycle of rising and falling: Now stagnant grows my too refinHd clay I envy birds their wings to fly away.1139

Musset’s narrator, more elegiac and philosophical than Byron’s in Don Juan, does lament his modern anti-hero Rolla’s helpless drift into debauchery. However, with the belief in an aim of life and a rewarding world beyond lost, he sees no alternative in a barren and ugly modern world: Allons! Vive l’amour que l’ivresse accompagne! Buvons au temps qui passe, / la mort, / la vie! Oublions et buvons; – vive la libert8! Chantons l’or et la nuit, la vigne et la beaut8!1140

Much as one can agree with Bernhard Jackson’s study of Byron’s sceptical philosophy, it is difficult to see the contradiction she finds between the selfisolationism of his epistemological scepticism and his overbrimming social interactions, love-affairs, and festivities.1141 No longer threatened by the construct of a punitive world to come, he could fully enjoy the pleasures of life without repenting the unproven truth of their sinfulness and without lamenting the indomitability of his passions, and he could be willing to pay the price of depression, diseases, and an exhausted profligate’s early quasi-suicidal death. Like his Decadent successors, he could burn his candle at both ends. In 1831, when he diagnosed self-conscious Pyrrhonism as the disease of his time on the threshold of the Victorian age, Thomas Carlyle fulminated against those who, like Byron, sought refuge in short-lived, worldly pleasures that had no lasting foundation in the unconscious depths of their human nature: A numerous intermediate class end in Denial; and form a theory that there is no theory ; that nothing is certain in the world, except this fact of Pleasure being pleasant; so they try to realize what trifling modicum of Pleasure they can come at, and to live contented therewith, winking hard.1142

Then, Carlyle was wrong in his prediction that Epicureanism would soon outlive itself and be dialectically overcome by a new faith and commitment resulting in a more lasting happiness. Pyrrhonism and Epicureanism vitiated and survived 1139 Ibid. 1. 6. 8–9, ed. cit. 181. 1140 Musset, Rolla, 1833, 3. 222–225, in: Po8sies complHtes, 283. 1141 Emily A. Bernhard Jackson, The Development of Byron’s Philosophy of Kowledge: Certain in Uncertainty, 181–185. 1142 Carlyle, Characteristics, 1831, in: Works, XXVIII. 31.

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Victorianism. In the middle of the century, Matthew Arnold still tried to disavow this philosophy in the long chant of the despairing Empedocles in his dramatic poem Empedocles on Etna (1852), a disavowal that was misunderstood for a recommendation, so that Arnold omitted the poem from his subsequent edition of his Poems (1853). Before his suicide, Empedocles recommends the enjoyment of life’s fleeting pleasures, with textual reminiscences of Epicurus, Rochester, and Byron, albeit moderated by the stoicism of Seneca and by Aristotelian nec nimis: Is it so small a thing To have enjoyed the sun, To have lived light in the spring, To have loved, to have thought, to have done; To have advanced true friends, and beat down baffling foes That we must feign a bliss Of doubtful future date, And while we dream on this, Lose all our present state, And relegate to worlds yet distant our repose?1143

The rising success of Edward Fitzgerald’s Rub#iy#t of Omar Khayy#m, first published anonymously and to no acclaim as a pamphlet in 1859, with many subsequent editions encouraged by D.G. Rossetti, attests to the survival of Pyrrhonian Epicureanism. This mixture of the Persian poet with Epicurus, Rochester, and Byron – a superb example of the literary possibilities when updating and fusing the Classical Tradition with European orientalism – links the injustice of the world and doubts about epistemology and theodicy with the recommendation of wine and woman in a most pleasurable, heretical way. Its “Kfflza-N#ma”, or “Book of Poets”, is a vision of vessels in a potter’s shop engaged in a discussion as to the potter’s intent and concept of justice in their creation. The scriptural parallel of pots and men, both made of clay, is evident. The vessels will not accept the facts of their short lives and return to earth, their uneven make, and their potter’s indifference to their individual fates. Their ridiculous efforts at philosophical sense-construction end in the admission of their real destiny, in which they find their only happiness: being filled with wine. And so they all long for the end of the pious but miserable Ramadan: So while the Vessels one by one were speaking, One spied the little Crescent all were seeking: And then they joggd each other, ‘Brother! Brother! Hark to the Porter’s Shoulder-knot a-creaking!’1144 1143 Arnold, Empedocles on Etna, I/2, 397–406, in: Poems, 172. 1144 Fitzgerald, Rub#iy#t of Omar Kh#yy#m, 1859, stanza 66 (first edition), 268.

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The same applies to wine and the rose, whose only destinies are to be drunk and plucked, respectively. Both find their only joy in this sensual acceptance of their fate. The young rose, the symbol of woman, even invites its own spoil – an ethical thoughtlessness and erotic appetite recommended by the wise, old, epicurean poet on account of the world’s injustice, contingency, and ephemerality : Look to the Rose that blows about us – ‘Lo, Laughing,’ she says, ‘into the world I blow : At once the silken Tassel of my Purse Tear, and its Treasures on the Garden throw.’1145 The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon Turns Ashes – or it propers; and anon Like Snow upon the Desert’s dusty Face Lighting a little Hour or two – is gone.

At the end of the century in Hardy’s more sombre and pessimistic novel Jude the Obscure (1895), the coarse pig butcher Arabella Donn is the only character to end up reasonably happy because she vulgarly enjoys life without undue consideration. Epicureans, be they profound philosophers or shallow sensualists, would not allow the injustices of the world to unbalance their equanimity, nor become unhappy in vain self-torturing and self-destructive attempts at overcoming them. In his search for the gratification of his appetites, Grabbe’s Don Juan, for instance, even gains a Promethean stature akin to the speakers of Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads (1866). This early collection of Swinburne’s rebellious poems stood in the tradition of the Spasmodic School of the 1850s and was scathingly reviewed as such by the Victorians committed to traditional values of faith and obedience.1146 In the wake of Blake’s praise of exuberance and in anticipation of Nietzsche’s disdain of religious restraint, the neopagan speaker of Swinburne’s “Dolores” admires the excesses of the combined joys and pains of life in antiquity, lamenting the ascetic Christian desertion of the beautiful pagan gods in the Victorian age: What ailed us, O gods, to desert you For creeds that refuse and restrain? Come down and redeem us from virtue, Our Lady of Pain.1147

Tannhäuser, the narrator of Swinburne’s “Laus Veneris”, deserts his mission as a medieval Christian knight and is content to wallow in the arms of his femme 1145 Ibid. stanzas 13–14, 242. 1146 See Kirstie Blair, Swinburne’s Spasms: Poems and Ballads and the Spasmodic School, in: Yearbook of English Studies, 36 (2006), 180–196. 1147 Swinburne, Poems and Ballads, Dolores, 1866, lines 277–80, in: Complete Works, I. 292.

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fatale in the Hörschelberg in an ecstasy of self-sufficient pleasure mixed with pain. He typifies the egocentric, Decadent dandy who has deserted Victorian vitality and commitment for the aestheticist hotbed of his isolated salon. Doubting of an aim beyond this life, he regards physical death as the ultimate end and, Pater-like, would squeeze as many ecstatic moments as possible into the given time: Behold now, surely somewhere there is death: For each man hath some space of years, he saith, A little space of time ere time expire, A little day, a little way of breath.1148

As the Persian rubais or quatrains indicate, however, Swinburne’s Tannhäuser is also modelled on Fitzgerald’s Omar Khayy#m, whose experience of life’s absurd circularity and aimlessness has made him accept both the pleasures of life and the finality of death as nothingness, the sweet and bitter cup of wine. The beautiful and beloved (male or female) cup-bearer is thus invited to pour out the wine of forgetfulness as long as life lasts: Ah! My Belov8d, fill the Cup that clears TO-DAY of past Regrets and future Fears – To-morrow? – Why, To-morrow I may be Myself with Yesterday’s Sev’n Thousand Years. […] Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend, Before we too into the Dust descend; Dust into Dust, and under Dust, to lie, Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer and – sans End!1149

Omar’s yearning is for relief in le grand n8ant, a word for which Fitzgerald, as he told Tennyson, found no equivalent in English: One Moment in Annihilation’s Waste, One Moment, of the Well of Life to taste – The Stars are setting and the Caravan Starts for the Dawn of Nothing – Oh, make haste!1150

Nietzsche, however, transcended the worldly hedonism of Byron, Fitzgerald, and Swinburne in propagating a new vision of a new man beyond – the Übermensch, or homo novus beyond the old man – and hence taught a new, vital asceticism free from Christian humility and traditional, virtuous self-restraint. Nietzsche 1148 Swinburne, Poems and Ballads, Laus Veneris, 1866, lines 69–72, ed. cit. I. 149. 1149 Fitzgerald, Rub#iy#t of Omar Khayy#m, 1859, stanzas 20 and 23 (first edition), 244–246. 1150 Ibid. stanza 38, ed. cit. 254. Also see Daniel Karkin, The Angry Omar, in: TLS, 5519 (January 2009), 15.

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denigrated the bourgeois (and the dandy by implication) as a kind of stubbornly epicurean “last man”, who stood in the way of the eternal world’s next aim, the Superman ever transcending the present man. In the words of his persona Zarathustra: “Ich lehre euch den Übermenschen. Der Mensch ist etwas, das überwunden werden soll”.1151 Nietzsche’s scathing satire on the bourgeois, with his lazy, sleepy, comfort-loving epicurean smugness, is too well-known to need further comment. When Zarathustra descends from the mountain to the earth, from the eagle to the snake,1152 obeying the law of eternal circularity, he finds both the single hermit and the large crowd defective. In the midst of the eternal circle both stand still, are self-centred, and cannot dance in tandem with the cosmic dance of circularity. And in this laziness, they will not realize the death of God, “dass Gott tot ist”.1153 The other major difference is that Byron, who was a pessimistic deist, based his advocacy of perseverance and resistance on Promethean pride, not to submit to the tyrant’s injustice by prayer or supplication. Byron hence argued ex negativo, in the typical way of Romantic Disillusionism. Nietzsche, by contrast, was a new optimist who advocated perseverance and resistance ex positivo because mankind had a next aim, the production of the Superman (although, as on a ladder leading into eternity, the next evolutionary step after the Superman remained invisible). In the words of Zarathustra: “Der Übermensch ist der Sinn der Erde”.1154 Nietzsche thus overcame Byron’s pessimistic deism as well as Schopenhauer’s pessimistic nihilism, giving aimless man and aimless history new aims and happiness. “Fröhliche Wissenschaft”, the much-misquoted title of one of his collection of aphorisms (1882), means that after reaching the knowledge of the death of god, metaphysics, and ethics, man can feel free to accept the chaos and violence of his existence and join the dancing Zarathustra in his hilarity and acceptance of life’s and the world’s injustices. Nietzsche’s references to similar thoughts in the Stoa and Buddhism mark his turn against Schopenhauer’s negation of life and the world. In conjunction with this, Nietzsche also overcame the dualism of spirit and body (as well as of art and life) in a way diametrically opposed to both Plato and the Platonic German Idealist philosophers. The snake, a traditional symbol of the earth and the body, and the eagle, a traditional symbol of Heaven and the spirit, were no longer “wreathed in fight”, but joined in the eternal circle of Zarathustra’s (instead of Childe Har1151 Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, VI. I. 8. English “superman” is misleading: German “über” is here used in the sense of Latin “trans” rather than Latin “super”. 1152 In this context it should be noted that Robinson’s contrastive study of P.B. Shelley’s and Byron’s literary relations and philosophical quarrels, The Snake and Eagle Wreathed in Fight, Baltimore 1976, does not quote Nietzsche. 1153 Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, ibid. 1154 Ibid.

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old’s) pilgrimage. The injustice of the world and the sufferings of the body could thus not be overcome by a metaphysical aim of man’s and this world’s history in a world beyond, but bravely borne with eyes uplifted to this eternal world’s infinity of evolutionary aims. One final aim – the synthesis and teleology of Positive Romanticism – remained firmly denied in a new doctrinal creed of nihilism. Like Zarathustra, knowledgeable man can face death with Stoic hilarity : Heiterkeit, güldene, komm! du des Todes heimlichster süssester Vorgenuss! – Lief ich zu rasch meines Wegs? Jetzt erst, wo der Fuß müde ward, holt dein Blick mich noch ein, holt dein Glück mich noch ein.1155

1155 Nietzsche, Dionysos-Dithyramben, Die Sonne sinkt, 1888, lines 37–43, VI. 3. 394.

V

Doubt of Synthesis: The Aimlessness of History

In the Classical Tradition, linear and circular concepts of history existed side by side through the centuries and were still in conflict during the Romantic Period. Hesiod, Ovid, Polybius, and the Bible – the Old Testament Book of Koheleth in particular – conceived history in terms of ever-repeating circles of upturns and downturns. Christ’s act of salvation was a soteriological incision, but not one that effected a change in this circular course of history. “Generatio praeterit, et generatio advenit; terra autem in aeternum stat”.1156 As the past and future had the same structure, man could only distinguish between a before, a now, and an after, understanding history as the lasting present.1157 Ultimate salvation from this circularity, as well as all human error and suffering, would not come until the advent of the Messiah. “Nihil sub sole novum”1158 nevertheless allowed man moderately to learn from history, “historia magistra vitae”. Thus, melioration was only tentatively conceived, as in Bossuet’s religionbased historiography of 1681. The ensuing Enlightenment, with its trust in the reason of the autonomous subject, then tended to conceive history as progress, often interrupted by setbacks and slowdowns but heading towards melioration, if not perfection (Voltaire, Condorcet, Kant). Nevertheless, circular concepts of history (as in Vico’s philosophy of history and Montesquieu’s and Edward Gibbon’s histories of the Roman Empire) continued to exist parallel to and conflicting with the Enlightenment mainstream of linear concepts. It was the great achievement of the Positive Romantic philosophy of history to combine enlightened melioristic linearity with mythical circularity and the Platonic concept of a dialectical evolution to a higher state that could be read as a secular pagan prefiguration of the Christian dialectical doctrine of life, death, and rebirth. Schelling discerned a progress in the circuitous journey of Ulysses 1156 Liber Ecclesiastes, qui ab Hebraeis Coheleth appellatur, 1, 4. 1157 Reinhart Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten, Frankfurt am Main 1979, 1989, 40. 1158 Ibid. 1, 10.

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and, in Hegel’s view, as we have seen, Napoleon was the World Soul or Anima Mundi on horseback, die Weltseele [later misquoted as der Weltgeist] zu Pferde. In Die Christenheit oder Europa (MS 1799) Novalis, the arch-critic of the Enlightenment that, in his view, disintegrated the unity of the na"ve, Latin, Catholic Middle Ages, justified the Enlightenment as a necessary evil, an antithesis to reach a higher synthesis in a better future, in a post-Leibnizian Platonic-Romantic theodicy. It was this Platonic-Hegelian idea of a dialectical spiral melioration that was empirically called into question by the events of contemporary history. Achim von Arnim’s novella Die Majoratsherren (1820) gives memorable expression to this doubt from the author’s experience of the outcome of the millennial dreams of the French Revolution. The reader is made contrastively to identify two generations: an old, pre-revolutionary and spiritualistic one doomed to death – its persuasion that the old order and its old rituals will last forever notwithstanding (Majoratsherr, Esther) – and a new, post-revolutionary and materialistic one that converts the old aristocratic manor into a salmiac factory (Vasthi): “[…] und es trat der Kredit an die Stelle des Lehnsrechts”.1159 If the synthesis of the antithesis of evil was only new evil, the dialectical cycles of history were suspected to be absurd circles, negating historical progress as well as the world’s purpose and aim. Platonic dialectics appeared like all Platonism: speculative attempts at imposing an order on chaos and contingency by claiming the existence of a spiritual world behind the empirical one. Both myth and history could be called on to confirm this doubt of historical dialectics. After the deluge (antithesis), God sent an ark and a rainbow in token of his salvation of lost and suffering mankind. However, instead of a better world, the deluge only produced suffering and both divine and monarchical injustice. When Japhet tries to justify the ways of God to man in a dialectical theodicy of the deluge in Byron’s Heaven and Earth (1822), the knowledgeable spirits from the caverns of Mount Ararat tell him (and us) that the new, regenerated world will be no improvement on the old one (and old regime): Meantime still struggle in the mortal chain, Till Earth wax hoary ; War with yourselves, and hell, and heaven, in vain, Until the clouds look gory With the blood reeking from each battle plain; New times, new climes, new arts, new men; but still

1159 Achim von Arnim, Die Majoratsherren, 1820, in: Erzählungen, ed. Gisela Henckmann, Reclams Universal Bibliothek, Stuttgart: Reclam 1991, 251.

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The same old tears, old crimes, and oldest ill, Shall be amongst your race in different forms.1160

Cain’s granddaughter Aholibamah, a Byronic heroine in her defiance of divine injustice, confirms the Spirits’ prophecy. There will be no progress in history, and a proud death in the deluge is nobler than a hopeless survival in the ark: Let us resign even what we have adored, And meet the wave, as we would meet the sword, If not unmoved, yet undismay’d, And wailing less for us than those who shall Survive in mortal or immortal thrall.1161

The world of Byron’s Don Juan, for instance, is one dominated by mere chance rather than purpose. The work mixed traditional heroic historiography and literary allusion with newspaper reports and tittle-tattle, underscored by capricious literary and sexual digression, the insistence on the antithetically-mixed nature of man, and the Shandyesque motif of authorial and female caprice.1162 Such a fragmented world and culture can have no aim or purpose. On the contrary, humankind moves in absurd circles, including downward spirals, as the disillusioned Grillparzer saw it after the formation of European nation states and the failure of the 1848 revolutions, which threw doubt on the optimism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s Hegelian Manifest der kommunistischen Partei published in London shortly before the February Revolution in France and the March Revolution in Germany : Der Weg der neueren Bildung geht Von Humanität Durch Nationalität Zur Bestialität.1163

Kleist’s comedy Der zerbrochene Krug (1806) had staged a funny, though equally disillusioned, view of history. It shows the downfall of a corrupt ancien r8gime (represented by Judge Adam and his lost, old-fashioned wig) effected by a new supervisor of the law (Counsellor Walter). Instead of initiating a new age of equal jurisdiction for all, however, Walter reinstalls the old one by recalling the corrupt Judge Adam and replacing him with Adam’s old secretary, Licht, whose plan to

1160 Byron, Heaven and Earth, 1822, 3. 207–214. Published in the year of P.B. Shelley’s death, in Byron’s and Leigh Hunt’s short-lived periodical The Liberal. 1161 Ibid. 3. 624–628. 1162 Jane Stabler, Byron, Poetics and History, Cambridge 2002, 136–171. 1163 Franz Grillparzer, Sämtliche Werke: Ausgewählte Briefe, Gespräche, Berichte, ed. Peter Frank – Karl Pörnbacher, Munich 1960, I. 500.

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be raised to Adam’s office unmasks him as just another representative of the ancien r8gime: “Fort! Tut mir den Gefallen, holt ihn wieder!”1164 The political allegory conveys a disillusioning message. After the deluge of the French Revolution there followed, after a short interval of peace, only further deluge and bloodshed in the Napoleonic Wars. Finding their countries occupied by the French army and ruled by members of Napoleon’s family, Continental Radicals and military officers, such as Kleist, actively fought the French in wars of liberation, although they knew they acted in the interest of their hated anciens r8gimes. Napoleon’s Empire, itself a new, feudal ancien r8gime, then ended in the very contrary of Paradise Regained: the Congress of Vienna. The restoration of the old order in Europe was followed by a temporary calm and Biedermeier. Instead of an expected millennium of peace, justice, and plenty, new conquerors, tyrants, and deluges would come. Doubting the anamnetic truth of myths and dreams, Byron substituted the biblical myth of the regenerating deluge with the real, daily experience of the all-devouring sea’s ebb and flow, again with reference to Napoleon, who […] would be all or nothing – nor could wait For the sure grave to level him; few years Had fix’d him with the Caesars in his fate, On whom we tread: For this the conqueror rears The arch of triumph! and for this the tears And blood of earth flow on as they have flowed, An universal deluge, which appears Without an ark for wretched man’s abode, And ebbs but to reflow! Renew thy rainbow, God!1165

To a believing Christian, the rainbow that followed the deluge was a symbol of a benevolent God’s connection with and care for his well-created world and the fate of man as his crowning creation. Where this creed was doubted, there could be neither a purpose nor an aim in history. But in Heaven and Earth, the ironic title suggests earth’s being swallowed up and destroyed by Heaven rather than redeemed and reunited with it. To the Byronic hero and doubter with the ironic name Christian in The Island (1823), the rainbow symbolizes false promises of a reunion of this world with God in a love that earthly reality will not allow. The rainbow fades, like a will-o’-the-wisp, into nothingness.1166 Instead of a deluge, Kleist’s short story “Das Erdbeben in Chili” (1807) fea1164 Kleist, Der zerbrochene Krug, Erstdruck, 1806, scene XII, in: Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, I. 357. 1165 Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 4. 92. 1–9. Note the wordplay-substitution of the real arches of triumph for the non-existent ark of God, and the vanity of the final prayer as proof of a deaf or non-existent God. 1166 Byron, The Island, 3. 207.

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tures an earthquake with the same effect, though with clearer references to the failure of the French Revolution and its ideals. Set in 1647, the Spanish ancien r8gime of church and state is about to destroy the love and lives of two Romantic lovers – Jeronimo and Josephe – who have “sinned” against its order by consummating their love in defiance of feudal regulations. However, the unexpected earthquake that destroys the whole ancien r8gime machinery of power – including the archbishop, the governor, and the paterfamilias – paradoxically saves the lovers’ lives, both in jail and at the place of their planned execution, through a concatenation of the most improbable accidents. The radical contingency of events defies all attempts at theodicy on the basis of a historical dialectic in a Romantic disillusionist succession to Voltaire’s sceptical tale Candide (1759). For a short time, described in terms of an illusory paradise, the survivors of the earthquake unite in libert8, 8galit8, fraternit8, helping each other across the spectrum of all former social distinctions. However, when they go to give thanks to God for their deliverance in a Dominican church that the earthquake has left untouched – a church of the order of the Holy Inquisition – the ancien r8gime sees its chance to reassert its power. A sermon explains the earthquake as being God’s punishment for Jeronimo’s and Josephe’s sin, deluding the churchgoers with a constructed sense imposed upon a mere historical accident. The lovers and the innocent child of their aristocratic friend Don Fernando are murdered by the previously peaceful congregation that relapses from fraternal love for all mankind into that anticipatory bloodlust when greedily waiting for the spectacle of Josephe’s planned execution. Instead of a dialectical fall and rise to something better, we have a chain of mere accidents in a succession of mere ups and downs, reminiscent of the Gothic novel. And this is mirrored in the lovers’ stumbling, falling, and recovering in the turmoil as well as in the ups and downs of Jeronimo’s mood, alternately praising the intercession of the Virgin and cursing the tyranny of Heaven: “Tiefe Schwermut erfüllte wieder seine Brust; sein Gebet fing ihn zu reuen an, und fürchterlich schien ihm das Wesen, das über den Wolken waltet”.1167 In his Gothic short tale “Das Bettelweib von Locarno” (1810), Kleist exemplified the breakdown of the aristocracy in a story that features a Marquis, a Marchioness, and their castle. The childless, loveless aristocratic pair sin against their duty of care for their subjects, thus causing the death of an old beggar woman. Her ghost haunts the castle so that the impoverished aristocrats cannot sell it, and it scares them to the extent that the Marchioness leaves in panic and the Marquis destroys the castle, and himself, in a final act of madness contrary to all military discipline. The ancien r8gime collapses in a chaos that recalls the tragic-comic turmoil of the French Revolution – a secularized iconology of hell – and leaves the reader 1167 Kleist, Das Erdbeben in Chili, 1807, in: Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, III. 195.

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without any future perspective. The Hegelian antithesis is followed by no Hegelian synthesis. It was with such a view of history as a succession of absurd circles in mind that, in 1811, the disillusioned Romantic (as well as disillusioned Aufklärer) Heinrich von Kleist committed suicide with Henriette Vogel, a girl terminally ill with cancer. As Kleist’s farewell letter to his sister Ulrike confessed, he was disillusioned to such a degree that he could no longer see any more help for himself in this world than for the dying girl. The letter mentions neither a possible world beyond nor a possible resurrection to a better life. In absurd circles the fall is always unavoidable, as in Kleist’s aforementioned tragic comedy Der zerbrochene Krug (1806), with its two fallen protagonists bearing the telling names of Adam and Eve. In a postlapsarian world, no knowledge of truth and no effort of justice can permanently restore the original, innocent, healthy, and holistic state of Paradise Lost, just as in the case of a broken clay vessel. In Byron’s Manfred, the evil Spirits and Destinies that form the court of Arimanes confirm that they swirl history in absurd circles, from one fall to another, sadistically enjoying the activity. They revive only to destroy again: they save the ship only to sink it later, they free the tyrant (Napoleon) only to lead him into a second disaster, and they offer “freedom, the forbidden fruit”1168 only to poison men with the false promises of Sodom’s apple, hiding only death and ashes beneath its seductive surface. As in Blake’s prophetic books, the suffering of subjects is the pleasure of tyrants, both divine and earthly, though Blake’s tyrants must one day fall for good. Theirs is the malignity which also characterizes the (invincible) Creator and fate of the world, as seen by Grabbe’s Byronic hero Theodor von Gothland: Weil es verderben soll, Ist das Erschaffene erschaffen! Deshalb ist unsers Leibes kleinster Nerv so Empfänglich für den ungeheuersten Schmerz, Deshalb sind unsre Glieder so gebrechlich, Deshalb sind wir so fasernackt geboren!1169

Byron’s admirer Bulwer-Lytton structured his historical novel Rienzi (1835) on the same circular pattern of the expected, but exploded, illusion of a historical synthesis. Fourteenth-century Rome, dominated by a corrupt aristocracy and clergy, falls back into its prior state of exploitation and arbitrariness after a few years of expectation of equal laws and justice under the restored Roman people’s tribune, Cola di Rienzi. As in ancient Rome, the stupid populace helps the corrupt aristocrats regain their power by murdering their liberator, who had 1168 Byron, Manfred, II/3, 71. 1169 Grabbe, Herzog Theodor von Gothland, III/1, 1827, I. 84.

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begun to assume tyrannical traits. Men are weak and flawed, and therefore the revolution always swallows its own children. This is also the ultimate message of Grabbe’s historical drama Napoleon oder Die hundert Tage (MS 1829–1830), begun shortly before the outbreak of the July Revolution when the rebellious spirit of the people returned to threaten the old regime. Grabbe foresaw its ephemeral nature and ultimate failure. His Napoleon’s one hundred days in power, between his return from Elba (1 March 1815) to his defeat at Waterloo (18 June 1815) epitomized that absurd circle of history forever revolving from disillusion to hope and back again. The people’s call, fight, and hopes for freedom and peace were once again destined to end in Napoleon’s military dictatorship, and that in turn in the restoration of Louis XVIII and his ancien r8gime. This message is underscored in the play’s insistently repeated circular structure, underscored by scenes where the petty merchants of Paris collect the old clothes and cockades in order to resell them when the cycles of history repeat. Napoleon, who trusts in being an instrument of Hegel’s World Soul to lead the world on to dialectical progress, must admit his error, suffer a second defeat, and return to exile. According to Grabbe, frustration would always be the reality of life, pricking all the successively upsurging dream bubbles of Positive Romantic millenarianism or meliorism. After all, the world and its history appear as a gigantic, kaleidoscopic comedy for which the chaos of the play’s opening scene, with its fairground bustle, sets the mood. The revolutionary Jouve has lost his faith and turned cynical: “’s ist ja doch alles Komödie”.1170 With their real experience of history’s circles, everyone in the play has grown older, but not necessarily wiser as none will give up his vain hope. Even the twice-defeated Napoleon clings to his discredited Hegelian Platonic concept of a World Soul that will ultimately improve the world: […] bis der Weltgeist ersteht, an die Schleusen rührt, hinter denen die Wogen der Revolution und meines Kaisertums lauern, und sie von ihnen aufbrechen läßt, daß die Lücke gefüllt werde, welche nach meinem Austritt zurückbleibt.1171

Just as Grabbe’s Napoleon, Jouve, Faust, and Theodor, as well as Büchner’s Lenz, have visions of personal progress only to be disappointed again and again, so men cherish visions of historical dialectical progress in general, only to be reminded of the aimlessness of history. This is the bitter disillusionment of Grabbe’s Napoleon at Waterloo: “Es ist aus. – Wir haben seit Elba etwa hundert Tage groß geträumt”.1172 Read in this light, E.A. Poe’s epigraph to his tale “The Pit and the Pendulum” 1170 Grabbe, Napoleon oder Die hundert Tage, IV/1, II. 204. 1171 Ibid. V/7, II. 273. 1172 Ibid. V/7, II. 272.

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(1842) is ironic when measured against the tale’s plot. The epigraph merges the death horrors of the Spanish Inquisition with those of the French Revolution, suggesting a dialectical regeneration in the building of a market on the site of the former Jacobin club house at Paris: “Mors ubi dira fuit, vita salusque patent”.1173 The narrator’s final salvation from the horrors of his dungeon is only partly due to his ratiocination in having his fetters gnawed through by rats; both his discovery of the pit and his liberation from the glowing metal walls forcing him into it are due to mere chance. And, finally, his liberator is one of Napoleon’s generals, merely replacing one inquisition and dictatorship by another. In and after 1830, the year of the July Revolution in France, Heine expressed his revolutionary enthusiasm and expectations, but profoundly doubted the idea of a dialectical and spiral form of historical progress. Quoting Byron’s Marino Faliero in order to mark his completed disillusion, he had come to view history and the seas as subject to the same cycle of ebb and flow without any progress: Die Welt bleibt, nicht im starren Stillstand, aber im erfolglosesten Kreislauf. […] Auch die Menschheit bewegt sich nach den Gesetzen von Ebb und Flut […] Es geschieht jetzt etwas Außerordentliches in der Welt […] Ist der große Pan tot?1174

Heine’s treatise on the history of religion and philosophy in Germany, written in French and German in 1833–1834, at first seems to develop a teleological concept of history by claiming a succession of revolutions: religious, philosophical, and political. It ends, however, by admitting the disillusioning side effect of political revolutions, which necessarily destroy polite culture and establish new forms of oppression, as exemplified in the case of Robespierre.1175 As Heine heard the tumult yet distrusted the success of the Parisian revolution of 1848 on his sickbed in Paris, Hazlitt was informed about the Parisian revolution of 1830 on his deathbed in London. The good news, however, would not cheer him. Like Keats and Percy Shelley at the end of their lives, the Radical had ultimately lost his hope of improvement: “Ah! I am afraid […] things will go back again!”1176 And Hazlitt’s doubts about the success of the revolution were justified. In the same year, King Charles X of France had to abdicate, only for King Louis Philippe to be enthroned as his successor. Tyranny followed upon tyranny, in 1830 as well as 1848. It seemed as if history had proved incapable of 1173 Poe, Tales of Mystery and Imagination, The Pit and the Pendulum, in: Collected Works, II. 681. 1174 Heine, Börne: Eine Denkschrift, 1830, in: Sämtliche Schriften, IV. 49–50. Note the final question with its reference to the alleged, though doubtful, death of the gods of classical antiquity (Plutarch, Life of Cimon) and Christian progress of the world; cf. his Les dieux en exile (1854). 1175 Heine, Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland, published in Der Salon. Zweiter Band (1834). 1176 Duncan Wu, William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man, Oxford 2009, 427–428.

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eradicating tyrants and their supporting churches, and representatives of the ancien r8gime made use of that disillusionment of Radicals. To see “in allen irdischen Dingen nur einen trostlosen Kreislauf” was a convenient fatalism easily appropriated by monarchs, and by their preachers as well as historians, to subdue the short-lived “Freiheitsfieber des Volkes”.1177 In fact, Hegel’s Positive Romantic philosophy of history also fatalistically denied man’s ability to shape time, claiming a “List der Vernunft in der Geschichte”, by which man argued himself into a false persuasion of his mastery. But Hegel claimed a dialectical self-deployment of history towards a self-realization of the spirit. To him, the succession of progression and regression, rise and fall, peace and war, was a purposeful dialectical spiral, pointing upwards.1178 Negative Romanticism saw no such coherent meliorism, neither through man’s own nor through history’s making. All human efforts at shaping or making a better future, let alone expectations of the automatic advent of a millennium on earth, were vain and painful. In Das goldene Vlies (1821), Franz Grillparzer’s view of historical development reads like an argument from the universal truth of myth against Hegelian philosophy. Grillparzer’s later epigrammatic statement that in modern cultural history man proceeds from humanity via nationalism to barbarity (1849), is here exemplified in an archetypal parallel to the Classical Tradition: Delphi and Apollo stand for humanity, Greece and Colchis for nationalism, and Medea’s murder of her rival and children for ultimate barbarity. Dialectical expectation ends in antithesis rather than synthesis. Meliorism is inverted, as Grillparzer’s open-ended tragedy ends in utter disillusionment with man’s hopes and aspirations in this world. In fact, Byron and Grillparzer held each other in high esteem in spite of Byron’s hatred of the Austrians for their occupation of Italy. Byron and Grillparzer were kindred spirits in their pessimism, their depression, their scepticism, and their rejection of all metaphysics, just as Grillparzer felt his kinship with Schopenhauer long before Schopenhauer replaced Hegel in the favour of German intellectuals.1179 Medea’s concluding words to Jason make the golden fleece a companion piece to Byron’s moon and will-o’-the-wisp, a shining but constantly illusory and destructive promise in a mere dream of happiness sought in vain in love and glory : Erkennst das Zeichen du, um das du rangst? Das dir ein Ruhm war und ein Glück dir schien? Was ist der Erde Glück? – Ein Schatten! 1177 Heine, Verschiedenartige Geschichtsauffassung, 1833, ed. cit. V. 21. Heine’s punning reference is to the Prussian historian Leopold von Ranke. 1178 G.W.F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, MSS Berlin 1822–1827, Berlin 1837. 1179 G. Hoffmeister, Byron und der europäische Byronismus, 116.

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Was ist der Erde Ruhm? – Ein Traum! Du Armer, der von Schatten du geträumt! Der Traum ist aus, allein die Nacht noch nicht.1180

In post-Napoleonic Germany, Georg Büchner’s Byronism bore much resemblance to Grillparzer’s, though Büchner’s possible debt to Grillparzer remains a matter of speculation. With Byron at the back of his mind, Büchner’s intensive study of the history of the French Revolution convinced him of the inaccuracy of any dialectical or otherwise teleological view of historical development – an insight that he communicated to his fianc8e in 1833: Ich studierte die Geschichte der Revolution. Ich fühlte mich wie vernichtet unter dem gräßlichen Fatalismus der Geschichte. Ich finde in der Menschennatur eine entsetzliche Gleichheit, in den menschlichen Verhältnissen eine unabwendbare Gewalt, allen und keinem verliehen. Der einzelne nur Schaum auf der Welle, die Größe ein bloßer Zufall, die Herrschaft des Genies ein Puppenspiel, ein lächerliches Ringen gegen ein ehernes Gesetz, es zu erkennen das Höchste, es zu beherrschen unmöglich. […] Das Muß ist eins von den Verdammungsworten, womit der Mensch getauft worden.1181

Büchner’s tragedy Dantons Tod (1835) is a discouraging exemplification of how futile the suffering and bloodshed of the French Revolution appeared to the Negative Romantics. As opposed to the narrow-minded Robespierre, Danton has an increasing insight into the futility of human action towards human improvement, aware of the fact that “Wir haben nicht die Revolution gemacht, sondern die Revolution hat uns gemacht”.1182 In view of the play’s chaos, Robespierre’s partisan St Just makes a fool of himself when he repeats the official, pseudo-Christian, dialectical justification of the unprecedented bloodshed: Die Revolution ist wie die Töchter des Pelias: sie zerstückt die Menschheit, um sie zu verjüngen. Die Menschheit wird aus dem Blutkessel wie die Erde aus den Wellen der Sündflut mit urkräftigen Gliedern sich erheben, als wäre sie zum ersten Male geschaffen.1183

Büchner exemplified in Danton’s fate what Byron exemplified in Don Juan’s: the aimlessness of history. Juan’s process of maturation, his liberalism and sexual Jacobinism, would not be successful. His sufferings would not lead him per aspera ad astra. Byron planned to end his tragicomic epic by having Juan either executed in 1793, in the terreur of the French Revolution, or by having him entrapped in marriage.1184 Although he was a Romantic individualist who 1180 Grillparzer, Das goldene Vlies, part III Medea, V, in: Werke, ed. cit. I. 351. 1181 Büchner, Letter to Wilhelmine Jaegle, November 1833, in: Sämtliche Werke, 401. The letter is also known as Büchner’s “Fatalismusbrief”. 1182 Büchner, Dantons Tod, beginning of act II, 33. 1183 Ibid., end of act II, 47. 1184 C. Franklin, Byron’s Heroines, Oxford 1992, 162.

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preached self-fulfilment for all sexes and denied that romantic love had anything to do with marriage,1185 Byron knew his vision was doomed to remain one of mankind’s beautiful and dangerous illusions. He viewed his own Radical Whiggism as being destined to ultimately fail in its hopeless conflict with man’s natural inclination to seek power, violence, and bloodshed, not least his repeated relapses into the social conventions of the ancien r8gime. Man would never learn and listen to reason, including Byron’s speeches and poems. Whereas, after the experience of an extreme catastrophe, Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner visits marriage feasts and tells his story with homiletic success, Byron’s Mazeppa tells his story to a king who falls asleep and learns nothing. Nor did the doppelganger view of antithetically mixed human nature allow for historical progress, undermined as man is by dark and evil impulses forever battling (and often winning) against virtue, rule, and reason. In his Gothic crime novels and stories, Byron’s admirer Sheridan Le Fanu combined the Romantic motif of the doppelganger with the related Romantic motif of the wiederganger, or revenant, in order to paint a backdrop of aimless and absurd circular history for his uncanny plots. In Le Fanu’s narratives, characters from an obsolete aristocracy are in permanent conflict with characters from a rising middle and lower class. They all have mixed and contradictory natures of love and hatred, virtue and vice, justice and wrongdoing, and conscious repression of impulses alternating with unconscious breakthrough of impulses. The duality of their minds is often represented in the form of a human or animal doppelganger, so that the fall of the aristocracy cannot possibly involve progress. The old aristocracy, however, is tough and resists its death, represented in cases of wiederganger or revenant – often undead vampires like Carmilla alias Millarca alias the long-deceased Countess Mircalla Karnstein.1186 In another Gothic story from In a Glass Darkly (1872), the cruel eighteenth-century Whig Judge Harbottle is himself hanged by a revolutionary Jacobite tribunal that serves to duplicate his own unjust tribunal and foreshadows the people’s tribunals of the French Revolution that sentenced noblemen to death.1187 Critically screening two centuries, Le Fanu found no progress but stagnation in a vicious circle of history. Popular penny dreadfuls, or Salisbury Square novels, of the mid-nineteenth century, like Varney the Vampire, or, The Feast of Blood (serialized in 1847), variously attributed to James Malcolm Rymer or Thomas Peckett Prest, helped to spread this sense of enduring evil and doubt of progress widely. Bram Stoker, who used both the penny dreadfuls and Le Fanu’s tale of Carmillla 1185 Ibid. 1186 Le Fanu, In a Glass Darkly, Carmilla, ed. Robert Tracy, Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford 1993, 1999, 243–319. Note the name anagrams, and see Jochen Achilles, Sheridan Le Fanu und die schauerromantische Tradition, 154–159. 1187 Le Fanu, In a Glass Darkly, Mr Justice Harbottle, ed. cit. 83–118.

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as sources for his Dracula (1897), not only showed the circularity of good and ineradicable evil, but went a step further in suggesting its spread. His nosferatu Count Dracula kisses many women and men, thus perverting the embrace of love regardless of sexual identity ; and those kissed by him infect a multiplicity of new victims, including children. The religious protection by cross and wafer proves to be ineffective – a fiction of disillusionment. Contrary to the Victorian scientific optimism of progress by medical and social engineering, Van Helsing describes the situation in terms of an ever-widening circle of epidemic evil: [The Un-Dead] canot die, but must go on age after age adding new victims and multiplying the evils of the world; for all that die from the preying of the Un-Dead become themselves Un-Dead, and prey on their kind. And so the circle goes on ever widening […]1188

Byron, with whose works Le Fanu and Stoker were well acquainted, viewed the course of history over millennia, from biblical times and myth to his own days, and found circles rather than upward spirals as well as contingencies rather than providential purposes. Byron’s wanderer Cain is the first man who comes to experience the aimlessness of life’s wanderings, a knowledge that is inconsistent with his overwhelming instinct to live on and beget children who, like himself, would rather have never been born.1189 In the course of his oddly contingent and aimless wanderings, Byron’s Don Juan, one of Cain’s successors in his initiation into the realities of life, makes the similar experience that both personal, national, and universal history is an absurd circle of events, characterized by an indefatigable life force in spite of man’s increasing insight into its unprofitableness, a contradiction that shows the illogical and antithetically-mixed nature of man. This is the deconstructive view of man’s personal history that Wilhelm Müller, an admirer of Byron, fictionalized in the final stanza of Die Winterreise, where the unfortunate traveller meets a barrel organ player who keeps on winding his crank instinctively, although the activity yields no profit. He is driven by the mere “instinct of life” that Byron’s Cain diagnoses as man’s only motive to live on in spite of his abhorrence of life. The organist’s habitual, senseless winding reflects the traveller’s habitual, senseless and aimless wanderings, “Nun weiter denn, nur weiter, Mein treuer Wanderstab!”,1190 showing him to be the melancholy wanderer’s alter ego:

1188 Stoker, Dracula, 1897, chapter XVI, ed. cit. 193. 1189 Byron, Cain, III/1, line 136. 1190 Müller, Gedichte aus den hinterlassenen Papieren eines reisenden Waldhornisten, II (1824), Die Winterreise, Das Wirtshaus, lines 15–16, in: Gedichte, 120.

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Drüben hinter’m Dorfe Steht ein Leiermann, Und mit starren Fingern Dreht er was er kann. Barfuß auf dem Eise Schwankt er hin und her ; Und sein kleiner Teller Bleibt ihm immer leer. Keiner mag ihn hören, Keiner sieht ihn an; Und die Hunde brummen Um den alten Mann. Und er läßt es gehen, Alles, wie es will, Dreht, und seine Leier Steht ihm nimmer still. Wunderlicher Alter, Soll ich mit dir gehn? Willst zu meinen Liedern Deine Leier drehn?1191

It is a recurring statement in the poetry of D.G. Rossetti, from his first to his last lyrics, that the earth is old, forever turning in circles of hope and disappointment, an observation culminating in Ovidian cultural pessimism. Ultimately, the earth’s evolution is tilted downward to an age of iron rather than upward back to an age of gold. The diagnosed cause is human nature, as apparent in modern capitalist individualism and egoism, refusing aid to men and nations in distress. Rossetti’s early sonnet “On Refusal of Aid between Nations” (MS 1845) does not lament changeability and suffering, but their lack of a dialectical order and higher aim: But because Man is parcelled out in men To-day ; because, for any wrongful blow No man not stricken asks, ‘I would be told Why thou dost thus’; but his heart whispers then, ‘He is he, I am I.’ By this we know That our earth falls asunder, being old.1192 1191 Ibid. Der Leiermann, lines 1–20, 123. See also Marshall Brown, Negative Poetics: On Skepticism and the Lyric Voice, in: Representations, 86 (2004), 120–140. 1192 D.G. Rossetti, On Refusal of Aid between Nations, MS 1845, lines 9–14, in: Collected Poetry and Prose, 189.

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The history of religions, in which men vainly sought to shape circularity into a purpose and emptiness into a heaven, is another instance of disconnectedness in history. As earlier in Byron’s Don Juan and later in Swinburne’s “Hymn to Proserpine” (1866), religions and civilizations come and go, leaving behind a few more or less explicable ruins sometimes in a better or, usually if anything, a worse conserved state. In D.G. Rossetti’s “The Burden of Nineveh” (MS 1850), the speaker leaves a museum gallery where he had escaped “the London dirt and din” to enjoy the relics of “Dead Greece”, and sees the arrival of a “winged beast from Nineveh”.1193 Dug out of the desert, it bears witness to the existence of a civilization and religion dead before that of ancient Greece – more ruinous, inexplicable, devoid of meaning, failing to instil the merest trace of religious awe or piety. The oncoming “callous wind” does not revive the dead statue but sweeps away its very shadow, nor does it inspire the viewer with any vision of the lost past or anamnesis of a world beyond.1194 The poem’s title and the many intertextual references of its symbolist diction are ironic, because the Bible’s “burden of Nineveh” (Nahum 1, 1) constructs the city’s fall as a purposeful result of pride and sin, whereas the poem sees it as the existential burden of mankind, without any relation to ethics or metaphysics. The pious, biblical cheat continues when schoolchildren are led into the museum and taught from ancient history that sin will meet divine punishment and that pride precedes downfall: While school-foundations in the act Of holiday, three files compact, Shall learn to view thee as a fact Connected with that zealous tract: ‘ROME, Babylon and Nineveh.’1195

Later, in a key sonnet of The House of Life, the heavenly sphere into which man and history hope to rise in due time is deconstructed into an image of shackles and circles, the sonnet ending on an absurd death in the ocean replacing purposeful ascension in the universe.1196 In another sonnet, the speaker and wanderer follows ever-evasive landmarks providing ever-denied refreshment on his pilgrimage to his life’s goal: water, to slake his thirst and cleanse him from his sins. However, unlike the pilgrimage of John Bunyan’s Christian and Christiana, he is lonely, disorientated, and grateful for the divine illusion of a goal that perpetuates his wandering. This individual’s pilgrim’s progress typifies the overall progress of history, a mere wild-goose chase: 1193 1194 1195 1196

D.G. Rossetti, The Burden of Nineveh, lines 1–10, 88. Ibid. lines 151–160, 92. Ibid. lines 76–80, 90. D.G. Rossetti, The House of Life, The Soul’s Sphere, 1870, 154–155.

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Yet though no light be left nor bird now sing As here I turn, I’ll thank God, hastening That the same goal is still on the same track.1197

As opposed to the Positive Romanticism of Percy Shelley, son-in-law and disciple of William Godwin (who was also disillusioned in the second part of his literary career), Byron doubted the power of both education and knowledge to improve society and lead history to any providential millennial perfection. Education could be provided and knowledge gained through experience of life and the study of history, but neither knowledge nor reason could influence the passions, and consequently there could be no basis for historical or biographical meliorism. On the Turkish slave market, where Don Juan and his experienced teacher John Johnson are being sold into bondage, Johnson expresses a faint (though vain) hope that the experience of slavery might perhaps “teach us better to behave when masters”. Juan’s vengeful reaction gives him the lie, casting the shadow of doubt upon the success of the anti-slavery activities of William Wilberforce. Even after the abolition of slavery, the world would continue to be populated by a vengeful society of masters and slaves, believers and nonbelievers, haves and have-nots. ‘Would we were masters now, if but to try Their present lessons on our Pagan friends here,’ Said Juan – swallowing a heart-burning sigh.1198

The Radical Whig Byron lived to see how the historical rise of 1807 (abolition of slavery) was followed by a historical fall or relapse into slavery with the formation of a new class of masters: owners of property and factories. As a resigned man of experience, the narrator of the epic poem’s alter ego, Johnson, realizes that the best advice he can give seems nothing but a waste of breath. And Byron, the omniscient, ironic author and consistently self-referential narrator, confirms him with regard to his own literary education and instruction of his readers: Oh, ye great Authors! – ‘Apropos des bottes’ – I have forgotten what I meant to say, As sometimes have been greater Sages’ lots; – ’Twas something calculated to allay All wrath in barracks, palaces, or cots: Certes it would have been but thrown away, And that’s one comfort for my lost advice, Although no doubt it was beyond all price.1199 1197 Ibid. The Landmark, 1870, lines 12–14, ed. cit. 157. 1198 Byron, Don Juan, 5. 24. 1–3. 1199 Ibid. 9. 36. 1–8.

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When passions have driven us to our misfortunes, we shall reap our friends’ reproaches for not having followed their advice, but arguments are too weak to withstand the storms of passion.1200 The preacher’s work for the improvement of private and social virtue, as understood by the latitudinarian divines of the eighteenth century as well as S.T. Coleridge, appeared as vain toil. His arguments from the profitableness of sobriety and the disadvantages of excessive drink cannot prevent intoxication when the passion arises, any more than in Coleridge’s own well-known case: […] they may preach Who please, – the more because they preach in vain, – Let us have wine and woman, mirth and laughter, Sermons and soda water the day after.1201

This is the idea behind the narrator’s invention of and reflection on Juan’s quickly gained knowledge of the Greek tongue. Juan learns his Romaic from Haid8e better than he would have learned it from books.1202 Intuition versus tuition is a typical preference of Positive Romanticism1203 which Byron, however, perverts for the sake of negation. Books offer mere instruction, whereas love irresistibly attracts a man to possess himself of the foreign tongue of his beloved.1204 The narrator’s tongue-in–cheek pretence that he can speak some Spanish, Turk, and Greek as taught him by female lips and eyes – but not much English as taught him by the great English preachers of Neoclassicism: Barrow, South, Tillotson, and Blair – constitutes a violent detraction from the value of theology and preachers whose advice must fall on barren ground: Much English I cannot pretend to speak, Learning that language chiefly from its preachers, Barrow, South, Tillotson, whom every week I study, also Blair, the highest reachers Of eloquence in piety and prose –1205 1200 Also cf. ibid. 13.29–30 and 15.29.1–8; Blessington, Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. cit. 198: “‘She [Augusta] has given me such good advice, and yet, finding me incapable of following it, loved and pitied me but the more, because I was erring.’” Byron, Journal, 19 September 1816, in: Letters and Journals, V. 99: “[…] the advice is excellent – but like most good advice impracticable […]” Byron, Letter to John Murray, 12 August 1819, ed. cit. VI. 206–7: “You are right – Gifford is right – Crabbe is right – Hobhouse is right – you are all right – and I am all wrong – but do pray let me have that pleasure.–… don’t ask me to alter for I can’t – … there’s the truth.” 1201 Byron, Don Juan, 2. 178. 5–8; cf. the ensuing stanza, 2. 179. 1–8. 1202 Ibid. 2. 163. 7–8. 1203 Coleridge, Frost at Midnight (1798), and R. W. Emerson, Essays (1841–1844). 1204 Byron, Don Juan, 2. 164. 1–8. 1205 Ibid. 2. 165. 3–7. This corresponds to Byron’s experience as a speaker in the House of Lords, reported in Detached Thoughts, 12 (1821), in: Letters and Journals, IX. 17: “[…] Cicero

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Byron saw with all the keenness of a vainly sermonized sinner that the great hope which the eighteenth century had invested in its preachers for the improvement of man and society had been unjustified in its immoderate optimism. He could hardly doubt that the latitudinarian sermon had substantially contributed to that peculiar climate of humanity and charity known as the peace of the Augustans, but all its exhortations to moderation and tolerance had availed nothing when the passions had risen beyond control, as in the mass hysteria of the Gordon Riots of 1780. Byron’s sarcastic comments on his wife’s and friends’ vain advice and reproaches were not only an actor’s catching of histrionic effects, but a serious protest against counsellors who prefer the ease of handing out reprimands to the toil of understanding. With satire being regarded as nothing but another mode of preaching, we can appreciate Byron’s sense of the uselessness of his own literary efforts for the advancement of society and history. Though starting from the traditional assumption that fools and sinners are kept in awe by satire,1206 Byron, then only twenty years of age, doubted the reformative success of his first major satire, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), on writers and critics1207 let alone on “fops, fools, gamesters, knaves, and lords”1208 in whose vices he felt himself irresistibly doomed to participate.1209 Two years later, in Hints from Horace (MS 1811), a modernized Horatian Ars Poetica intended as a sequel to English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, he no longer spoke of the didactic purpose of satire, but saw Dryden, Pope, and Swift as merely venting their selfish spleens instead of – vainly – laughing mankind out of their follies and vices. He is thus himself one of the dunces of his own modern Popean Dunciad: Satiric rhyme first sprang from selfish spleen. You doubt – see Dryden, Pope, St. Patrick’s dean.1210

A recent publication correctly argues that personal hatred (not correction of vices and follies) was the main force in the formation of Byron’s satire, quite contrary to the concept of satire (not libel) in the Classical Tradition.1211 It was this sneering or contemptuous laughter that Matthew Arnold and numerous other Victorians found fault with both in Byron and Heine, because it lacked the earnestness of moral improvement in view of the world’s follies and short-

1206 1207 1208 1209 1210 1211

himself – and probably the Messiah could never have alter’d the vote of a single Lord of the Bedchamber or Bishop.” Byron, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, lines 27–36. Ibid. lines 37–44. Ibid. line 649. Ibid. lines 687–706. Byron, Hints from Horace, lines 115–116. Peter Cochran, Byron and Bob, Newcastle-upon-Tyne 2010, passim (on Byron’s hatred of Robert Southey).

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comings. Remembering his visit to Heine’s grave and his reading of Heine’s Harzreise, Arnold compared Goethe’s and Heine’s visits of the Harz Mountains to Heine’s detriment, and that in classical “pindarics”: […] but he [Goethe] Destined to work and to live Left it, and thou, alas! Only to laugh and to die.1212

Heine added another aspect to the disillusionist doubts as to man’s capability of improvement, which occasionally flashes up in Byron’s letters and journals and demolishes Platonic Romantic poetics. Satire sold well, meaning fools were the poet’s clients and capital to make his readers laugh and buy his books. Far from desiring to eradicate folly, the poet revelled in a world of fools, just as a tradesman rubbed his hands at the sight of a full warehouse or a cook enjoyed a full pantry. Far from inciting his readers’ desires to return to an original world of ideas, unity, and perfection, he wanted to serve their very earthly appetites (and ensure his own income) by roasting and spicing every fool into an expensive literary meal: “[…] für das Honorar, das ich aus ihm herausschreiben werde, kaufe ich mir ein gutes Faß Rüdesheimer Rheinwein”.1213 However, this comical reduction of ideals to eating and drinking, while being typical of the works of Byron, Heine, and Büchner, left their authors deeply scarred. They had been taught otherwise. Positive Romanticism had promised them a prophetic mission with great expectations (both here and hereafter), the Classical Tradition of Horace and Pope had given them an outstanding social function, and the loss of both ultimately ruined their health. Byron’s increasing belief in the historical uselessness of his literary efforts, for instance, explains much of his premature exhaustion and feeling of old age, the transformation from the violent protest of the Byronic heroes of The Giaour and Manfred into the lethargic resignation to the state of things as they appeared to him in Don Juan. The beginning of the thirteenth canto of Don Juan, announcing a sad and serious matter, leads Byron to a weary characterization of his new narrative art which is no longer that of his earlier heroic pieces: For my part, I am but a mere spectator And gaze where’er the palace or the hovel is, Much in the mode of Goethe’s Mephistopheles; But neither love nor hate in much excess; Though ’twas not once so.1214 1212 Arnold, Heine’s Grave, 1867, lines 195–198, in: Poems, 477. 1213 Heine, Ideen: Das Buch Le Grand, 1827, in: Sämtliche Schriften, II. 295. 1214 Byron, Don Juan, 13. 7. 6–8 and 13. 8. 1–2.

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The mature author and narrator has given up the fervid engagement and reformative zeal of his youth to become a mere spectator, or rather (as the meaningful comparison with Goethe’s Mephistopheles suggests) a diabolical guide who regales his disciple with an unvarnished view of the whole kaleidoscope of society, high and low.1215 It is a method of presentation that recurs later in The Deformed Transformed, with the fiendish Caesar showing his originally inexperienced and progressively disillusioned disciple Arnold the world as it is – its scenes of blood and lust, its danger and vanity in love and war, and its hopeless determinism precluding all lasting historical progress.1216 The narrator of Don Juan is still apt to take sides for or against things in existence – he still has ideals to love and abuses to hate – but the intensity of his love and hatred has been modified by his resigned conviction that values are subject to change, and that man and society are not to be improved: I should be very willing to redress Men’s wrongs, and rather check than punish crimes, Had not Cervantes in that too true tale Of Quixote, shown how all such efforts fail.1217

Byron (and Heine after him)1218 did not simply understand Don Quijote as a grandiose parody of the romances of chivalry current in sixteenth-century Spain, but as the most comic, yet saddest, of all tales showing the frustration of a champion of truth and virtue in a hopelessly unreformable world: Of all tales ’tis the saddest – and more sad, Because it makes us smile: his hero’s right, And still pursues the righ; to curb the bad, His only object, and ’gainst odds to fight, His guerdon: ’tis his virtue makes him mad! But his adventures form a sorry sight; – A sorrier still is the great moral taught By that real Epic unto all who have thought.1219

1215 Also cf. the function of the liberated bottle-imp in Velez de Guevara’s El Diablo Cojuelo (1641) and Alain-Ren8 Lesage’s Le diable boiteux (1707), who lifts the roofs off the houses to show his benefactor what is passing within. 1216 Byron, The Deformed Transformed, I/2, 25–33. Quoted above. 1217 Byron, Don Juan, 13. 8. 5–8. For Byron’s characteristic “abandonment of himself to his destiny” also see Blessington, Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. cit. passim. 1218 Heine, Cervantes: Der sinnreiche Junker Don Quixote von La Mancha, 1837, in: Sämtliche Schriften, III. 151–170. 1219 Byron, Don Juan, 13. 9. 1–8. Note the critical terms “true tale” and “real epic”: Don Quijote is fiction not in the sense of romance, but in the sense of a copy of true and real life as experienced and literized by Byron.

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At the same time, Byron realizes the historical destructiveness of relieving the world of its romantic illusions, leaving it bereft. He explains the decline of Spain after its siglo de oro as a negative effect of its greatest and most truthful literary work, much as he sees the decline of man as a negative effect of his loss of those feverish utopian dreams discussed above, illusions that alleviate the pains of life and nature’s woes, and gild the grey dreariness of depressing, suffocating reality : THE spell is broke, the charm is flown! Thus is it with life’s fitful fever : We madly smile when we should groan: Delirium is our best deceiver.1220

Men stand in need of illusions to maintain their energy and vitality.Once reality has totally dispelled the charm of romance they fall into a Childe-Harold-like lethargy and depression, grow weary of building another raft of hope from the shattered wreck of their foundered pre-Conradian ship of illusions, too tired to resume the vain battle with the ultimately invincible breakers of death’s ocean.1221 Byron is at once prone and reluctant to unveil the truth of things as they are: Cervantes smiled Spain’s Chivalry away ; A single laugh demolished the right arm Of his own country ; – seldom since that day Has Spain had heroes. While Romance could charm, The world gave ground before her bright array ; And therefore have his volumes done such harm, That all their glory, as a composition, Was dearly purchased by his land’s perdition.1222

1220 Byron, The Spell Is Broke, MS 16 January 1810, lines 1–4. 1221 Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 4. 105. 1–9: And from the planks, far shattered o’er the rocks, Built me a little bark of hope, once more To battle with the ocean and the shocks Of the loud breakers, and the ceaseless roar Which rushes on the solitary shore Where all lies foundered that was ever dear : But could I gather from the wave-worn store Enough for my rude boat, where should I steer? There woos no home, nor hope, nor life, save what is here. Note the earlier use of the pessimistic imagery and symbolism later perfected in the shipwreck episode of Don Juan, 2. 4–106, as analysed above, and cf. Joseph Conrad’s The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897), end of chapter I. 1222 Ibid. 13. 11. 1–8. For Byron’s Janus-faced assessment of the illusions of life, as expressed in this stanza, also see Wilkie, Byron and the Epic of Negation, 218–219.

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This ambivalent attitude leads us to another important aspect of Byron’s pessimism in matters of lasting historical progress and reform. After all the stanzas exposing the vanity of heroism, Byron could not possibly regret its destruction through Cervantes’s novel. Don Quijote had, in fact, caused an important social change, and Byron probably expected a similar effect from his Don Juan. A literary author possessed the power to bring about radical changes, but those were both for the better and worse. Every step forward involved one backward; history moved round in an absurd circle. Reform, in the eighteenth-century sense of progress, remained impossible. It is in this context that we must understand the reductio ad absurdum of the idea of progress in the first canto of Don Juan. “What opposite discoveries we have seen!”,1223 introduces an enumeration of odd inventions which, if they did not prove absurdly tragicomic failures like the reanimation of corpses by galvanism,1224 neutralized each other so as to prevent any real progress: One makes new noses, one a guillotine, One breaks your bones, one sets them in their sockets.1225

Every advance towards the preservation of life is matched with one towards its destruction. Byron sardonically explains this as a law of nature because, according to Thomas Robert Malthus, wars, plagues, and famines are nature’s safeguards against overpopulation.1226 Ten years after Edward Jenner had discovered a method of vaccination against smallpox,1227 Sir William Congreve invented his famous rockets of various calibers and warheads to advance the destructive power of conventional warfare.1228 Even then no one could be sure whether the extirpation of the “small pox” would not entail the spread of a much more loathsome plague, the “great pox” or syphilis, to help restore the natural population balance.1229 According to this law of nature, such various achievements as Sir Humphry Davy’s invention of a safety lantern for miners, accounts of travels to Timbuctoo, and voyages of discovery to the arctic regions are “ways to benefit mankind, as true, […] as shooting them at Waterloo”.1230 The ob1223 1224 1225 1226

1227 1228 1229 1230

Byron, Don Juan, 1. 129. 1. Ibid. 1. 130. 2. cf. ibid. 10. 2. 6–8. Ibid. 1. 129. 3–4. Ibid. 1. 131. 3–6 For the unspecified reference to Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) see F.L. Beaty, Byron on Malthus and the Population Problem, in: KShJ, XVIII (1969), 20–21. For Byron’s understanding of Malthus see Letters and Journals, II. 74 and 11. 98. Edward Jenner, Enquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae, London 1798. 1805–07, see Roger T. Stearn’s ODNB-article. Byron, Don Juan, 1. 129. 5–8. Ibid. 1. 130. 7–8 et 1. 131. 1–8. Also cf. Byron, Ravenna Journal, 9 January 1821, in: Letters and Journals, VIII. 20: “An extirpated disease is succeeded by some new pestilence […]” Byron, Don Juan, 1. 132. 7–8. George Meyer Ridenour’s theory that Byron saw inventions

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servance and continuity of this law of nature, conducive to the stagnation of all progress and reform, is guaranteed in the ambivalent nature of man, as seen by Byron, and makes history revolve in a circle without any cultural progress. The sceptic Byron opposed essentialism and foundationalism, doubting the doctrine (shared by the latitudinarians and Positive Romantics) that good and evil were absolute moral values, deeply implanted in every soul and manifesting themselves in the voice of a conscience common to all men. Later, Eduard von Hartmann meant much the same with his observation that “für jede überwundene Art von Leid verschiedene neue Formen des Leids nachwachsen”.1231 However, Hartmann’s attempt to fit this circularity into a respectable concept of a linear progress of civilization – in the sense of man’s education by hardships and suffering – was doomed to fail, as his chief critic Nietzsche had little difficulty proving. Scepticism and teleology, however moderate in claiming the increase of suffering with the progress of ethical education and civilization, cannot go together. Byron’s sarcastic comments on the relativity of a good and bad conscience constitute an outright attack on the doctrines of theological writers, from South and Tillotson to Blair and Porteus: A quiet conscience makes one so serene! Christians have burnt each other, quite persuaded That all the Apostles would have done as they did.1232

Hence Byron’s iconoclastic lines in the same canto on the various and contradictory origins of the feeling of pleasurable sweetness in the soul of man.1233 After two-and-a-half stanzas describing the sweetness of idyllic scenes1234 the narrator proceeds to the sweetness derived from human things and acts: Sweet to the miser are his glittering heaps, Sweet to the father is his first-born’s birth, Sweet is revenge – especially to women, Pillage to soldiers, prize money to seamen.1235

1231 1232 1233 1234 1235

and discoveries, including his own poetry, as genuine things “to counterbalance human woes” denies the bitter irony and conscious absurdity of such affirmations that man fell with Adam’s apple to rise with Newton’s, and that steam-engines will one day conduct him to the moon (ibid. 10. 2. 1–8). It must be maintained against Ridenour that such strong infusions of irony and absurdity are a negating and not merely a complicating element in Byron’s poetry (Ridenour, The Style of Don Juan, 29–31). Hartmann, Zur Geschichte und Begründung des Pessimismus, Berlin 1880, 139. Byron, Don Juan, 1. 83. 6–8. Ibid. 1. 122–127. Ibid. 1. 122. 1–8; 1. 123. 1–8; 1. 124. 1–4. Ibid. 1. 124. 5–8. For the miser’s pleasure in hoarding riches cf. ibid. 12. 3–14.

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To put these joyous feelings on the same level was to deny the activity of a conscience that fills the virtuous with pleasure and the vicious with pain. This is the reason why Juan can love and kill alternately with equal satisfaction and devotion to his cause – finding pleasure in both – though happiness is a higher feeling, largely restricted to love and Haid8e’s paradise. Here again, Juan does not appear as an isolated self-portrayal of Byron but as an example of his concept of the “antithetically mixed”1236 and general nature of man experienced in himself.1237 In real life man derives equal pleasure from the most heterogeneous sources, no matter whether these be morally good, bad, or indifferent: ’Tis sweet to win, no matter how, one’s laurels By blood or ink; ’tis sweet to put an end To strife; ’tis sometimes sweet to have our quarrels, Particularly with a tiresome friend.1238

This dual, complex nature of man finds its counterpart in the dual, complex nature of things, corresponding to their lack of firm, inherent values. Byron’s well-known and solemn description of the twilight hour of evening1239 contains a far deeper symbolism than has hitherto been recognized. The twilight, the mixture of day and night, points to its equal dispensation of joy and sorrow : Oh Hesperus! thou bringest all good things – Home to the weary, to the hungry cheer, To the young bird the parent’s brooding wings, The welcome stall to the o’erlabour’d steer ; Whate’er of peace about our hearthstone clings, Whate’er our household gods protect of dear, Are gather’d round us by thy look of rest; Thou bring’st the child, too, to the mother’s breast. Soft hour! which wakes the wish and melts the , heart Of those who sail the seas, on the first day 1236 Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 3. 36. 2. Applied to Napoleon, in whom Byron believed he recognized most clearly his own extremeness in all things. Also see B. Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, Byron and the Modern World, 1945, 2nd edn. London 1971, 716– 721. 1237 See e. g. Byron, Don Juan, 17. 11. 1–8, and Blessington, Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. cit. 71–72 and 220. The most perceptive analysis of the contradictory elements in Byron’s split nature was made by G.W. Knight in Byron: Christian Virtues; see especially the comparison of Byron and Napoleon, ibid. 247. 1238 Byron, Don Juan, 1. 126. 1–4. Also cf. Byron, The Giaour, lines 1008–1011: Yet death I have not fear’d to meet; And in the field it had been sweet Had danger woo’d me on to move The slave of glory, not of love. 1239 Byron, Don Juan, 3. 101–108.

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When they from their sweet friends are torn apart; Or fills with love the pilgrim on his way As the far bell of vesper makes him start, Seeming to weep the dying day’s decay ; Is this a fancy which our reason scorns? Ah! surely nothing dies but something mourns.1240

In other words, there is nothing in existence, save for in men’s illusions, that does not comprise pleasant and unpleasant aspects – not even, as we have seen, death itself. Where Pyrrhonism denies man and things any naturally distinct and inherent qualities, delegating them to the eyes of various observers in various moods, the qualities themselves become blurred and merged. Malcolm Kelsall has conclusively argued that it was Byron’s persuasion that the whole world was created indiscriminately – a world view that moved him to develop, with increasing success, a mixture of stylistic modes, violating the Neoclassical decorum by juxtaposing tragic and comic language corresponding to his integral Juvenalian view of Democritus and Heraclitus and to his complex sentiments of tears and laughter.1241 With his modern, sceptical anthropology and experience of the world, the expert in and advocate of the Classical Tradition deviated from it in this respect. His heterogeneous mixture was at the core of modern tragicomedy as analysed by Guthke and Nemoianu. The fall of a most despicable tyrant like Nero following Suetonus, Byron’s ensuing stanza informs us, did not elicit joy without simultaneously causing sorrow : When Nero perish’d by the justest doom Which ever the destroyer yet destroy’d, Amidst the roar of liberated Rome, Of nations freed, and the world overjoy’d, Some hands unseen strew’d flowers upon his tomb: Perhaps the weakness of a heart not void

1240 Ibid. 3. 107–108. 1241 Kelsall, The Childe and the Don, in: Byron Journal, 4 (1976), 60–73. To support his view of Byron’s simultaneous admiration of the laughing and the weeping philosopher, as integrated in Juvenal’s tenth Satire, Kelsall quotes Byron’s Letter to Francis Hodgson, 9 September 1811, ed. cit. II. 95. Also see Byron’s spirited defense of “the quick succession of fun and gravity” in Don Juan against the strictures of Francis Cohen (Palgrave) in his Letter to John Murray, 12 August 1819, ed.cit. VI. 207. For the influence of Byron’s Don Juan on Keats’s The Cap and Bells (MS 1819), with respect to the mixture of romantic and satiric elements as well as serious and comic styles, see Miriam Alliott’s edition of The Poems of John Keats, 702, and F. Matthey, The Evolution of Keats’s Structural Imagery, Bern 1974, 266–269. In this connection we should also mention Edgar Allan Poe’s tale The Assignation (1834), in which Byron figures as one of Poe’s typical heroes, a despiser of the mass and a hater of traditional limitations, who ignores the rules of decorum and biens8ance and who comprises tears and laughter in one view of life’s totality.

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Of feeling for some kindness done when power Had left the wretch an uncorrupted hour.1242

Even the description of the gory battle at Ismail is tragicomic. The reader is moved to laugh at the preposterous fortifications of the “fortress […] called Ismail”,1243 with a citadel so ingeniously designed that it impedes the fire of the occupants and assists the assailants,1244 and that features a deep town-ditch and high, half-finished and half-neglected ramparts.1245 To crown the burlesque character of the renowned fortress the Turkish military engineers have totally forgotten the possibility of a naval attack, leaving the town totally unfortified from the river.1246 Nor do the Russians escape equal ridicule. Their batteries are so poorly constructed that, on launching the attack, they blow up their own fireships, waking the sleeping Turks who were slumbering despite their knowledge of the hostile Russian flotilla’s presence on the Danube. Apart from the absurd aimlessness of military strategy, the stanzas suggest the very discouraging and subversive possibility of soldiers dying not for their god, king, and country but for the benefit of industrial war profiters – ideas that were to recur later in the trench poems of the Great War 1914–1918: Whether it was their [the Russians’] engineer’s stupidity, Their haste, or waste, I neither know nor care, Or some contractor’s personal cupidity, Saving his soul by cheating in the ware Of homicide, but there was no solidity In the new batteries erected there; They either missed, or they were never missed, And added greatly to the missing list. A sad miscalculation about distance Made all their naval matters incorrect; Three fireships lost their amiable existence Before they reached a spot to take effect: The match was lit too soon, and no assistance Could remedy this lubberly defect; They blew up in the middle of the river, While, though ’twas dawn, the Turks slept fast as ever.1247

1242 1243 1244 1245 1246 1247

Byron, Don Juan, 3. 109.1–8. Ibid. 7. 9. 1. Ibid. 7. 10. 1–8 and 7. 11. 1–2. Ibid. 7. 11. 3–8. Ibid. 7. 13. 1–8. Ibid. 7. 27–28.

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Man and his aims and acts being such antithetically-mixed compounds of selfpreservation and self-destruction, love and hatred, joy and grief, amusement and disgust, laughter and tears, changes could involve no real improvements. Besides, Byron knew another, hardly less potent reason for the stagnation of all lasting historical progress, the animal nature of man, and his bell-wether nature in particular. His narrator illustrates this by the Russian Field Marshall Suvorov’s absolute sway over his soldiers. Suvorov is a little, odd, old man,1248 running about stript to his shirt1249 and doing a corporal’s job by drilling his recruits himself.1250 And yet this preposterously comical caricature of a field marshal manages to instil his men with martial enthusiasm and to make them follow him into a battle for mere colonial expansion of which every one knows that it might prove his death: ’Tis thus the spirit of a single mind Makes that of multitudes take one direction, As roll the waters to the breathing wind, Or roams the herd beneath the bull’s protection; Or as a little dog will lead the blind, Or a bell-wether form the flock’s connection By tinkling sounds, when they go forth to victual; Such is the sway of your great men o’er little.1251

When Byron makes Johnson retire and leaves Juan as the sole survivor of his corps valiantly carrying on the fight in the battle’s critical stage, he not only makes us realize Juan’s inexperience and mere good luck, but also reminds us of his narrow escape as the sole survivor of the shipwreck. Johnson retires to rally the scattered, disheartened soldiers behind the lines and renew the attack. In spite of their fears and exhaustion they gather around him as upon a conjurer’s call: And these he called on; and, what’s strange, they came Unto his call, unlike ‘the Spirits from The vasty deep,’ to whom you may exclaim, Says Hotspur, long ere they will leave their home. Their reasons were uncertainty, or shame At shrinking from a bullet or a bomb, And that odd impulse, which in wars or creeds Makes men, like cattle, follow him who leads.1252 1248 1249 1250 1251

Ibid. 7. 49. 7. Ibid. 7. 49. 8. Ibid. 7. 52. 1–4. Ibid. 7. 48. 1–8. Note the ironic pun on Suvorov’s greatness and size in the stanza’s last line. 1252 Ibid. 8. 38. 1–8.

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The image of the magician conjuring up spirits, illustrative of the bellwether nature of man in matters of war and religion, leaves no hope for real historical improvement. The multitude are so disposed as to follow their leaders blindly, even to their own destruction, unable to judge and act for themselves. A watchword spread to vindicate the wrong and warp the right will make men follow any bloody cause: Religion – freedom – vengeance – what you will, A word’s enough to raise manking to kill.1253

Some religious leaders, wise fools in matters of philosophy, vainly tried, with raving minds, to reach beyond the confines of the body and teach an essentialist creed, the observance of which would certainly have improved both man and society.1254 The most outstanding example that Byron names is Jesus of Nazareth, but as the lesson “learn to do no wrong”1255 has never fallen on fertile ground, Jesus’s pure creed was perverted and made the sanction of all ill.1256 Even the hope that man’s bellwether nature might, in the long run, be used for his benefit has proved empty in the course of his circular history. Neither is there any expectation that man’s vainglorious nature might be harnessed for his own good. The fame of Dante, as we have seen, is greater and more enduring than that of Gaston de Foix; the fame of Washington and Bolivar purer than that of Wellington and Napoleon.1257 The latter military adversaries had it in their power to increase their fame by breaking the shackles of millions, but instead they sullied it by renewing the very fetters that they broke.1258 As a result of the incapacity of man to regulate his passions by his reason, men would not learn the lessons of history and could not, as the optimistic latitudinarian preachers had assumed, be virtuous through consideration of their own true interests:1259 A single step into the right had made This man [Napoleon] the Washington of worlds betray’d: A single step into the wrong has given His name a doubt to all the winds of heaven; The reed to Fortune, and of thrones the rod, Of Fame the Moloch or the demigod; His country’s Caesar, Europe’s Hannibal, 1253 1254 1255 1256 1257 1258 1259

Byron, Lara, 2. 222–223. Byron, Don Juan, 15. 18. 1–4. Byron, The Age of Bronze, lines 231–232. Byron, Don Juan, 15. 18. 2–6. Byron, The Age of Bronze, lines 249–252. Byron, Don Juan, 9. 9. 1–8, and The Age of Bronze, lines 253–259. Rolf Lessenich, Elements of Pulpit Oratory in Eighteenth-Century England (1660–1800), Cologne and Vienna 1972, 187–201.

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Without their decent dignity of fall. Yet Vanity herself had better taught A surer path even to the fame he sought, By pointing out on history’s fruitless page Ten thousand conquerors for a single sage.1260

The irredeemable victim of his own unchangeable nature, man’s condition upon earth has remained the same since time immemorial, cruel, bleak, and hopeless: The lapse of ages changes all things – time – language – the earth – the bounds of the sea – the stars of the sky, and every thing ‘about, around, and underneath’ man, except man himself, who has always been, and always will be, an unlucky rascal. 1261

The high ideals of liberty that impress any reader of Don Juan are hence constantly being revised to the quality of simple, airy illusions incapable of being realized. The oppressed nations were at last falling “sick of imitating Job”1262 and struggled for freedom against their tyrants. The pessimist Byron could not possibly share Godwin’s and Percy Shelley’s optimistic belief that tyranny may be overcome by the peaceful necessity of rhetorical persuasion.1263 On the contrary, Byron remained convinced […] that Revolution Alone can save the Earth from Hell’s pollution.1264

This does, however, not simply mean that the mature Byron of Don Juan offered rebellion as a practical solution for abolishing the evils of tyranny and subjection, as Andrew Rutherford would have us believe.1265 True, in the third canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, published in 1816, Byron still attributed the lamentable failure of the French Revolution to the immaturity of the people –1266 much in the manner of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin – confidently expecting an unavoidable later revolution to be conducted with more experience and attended 1260 Byron, The Age of Bronze, lines 233–244. 1261 Byron, Ravenna Journal, 9 January 1821, ed. cit. VIII. 19. It is typical of Byron how thoroughly he misinterpreted and adapted Samuel Johnson’s basically optimistic poem The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) to his own pessimistic thoughts. Byron, Detached Thoughts, 116 (1821), ed. cit. IX. 50–51, is yet another instance of such thorough appropriation: Byron read Henry Fielding’s Jonathan Wild (1743) as a Radical pre-Jacobin novel, ignoring the latitudinarian novelist’s doctrine of man’s duty to submit to Providence and not to exceed his right of opposing political corruptness (Wild-Walpole-parallel). 1262 Byron, Don Juan, 8. 50. 8. 1263 Rolf Lessenich, Godwin and Shelley : Rhetoric versus Revolution, in: Studia Neophilologica, 47 (1975), 40–52. 1264 Byron, Don Juan, 8. 51. 7–8. 1265 Rutherford, Byron: A Critical Study, Edinburgh and London 1961, 181. 1266 Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 3. 83. 1–9.

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by more success.1267 Freedom’s banner is tattered but still flying, and freedom’s tree is blossomless but still holds sap and seed for the next spring, bringing forth less bitter fruit.1268 It is the imagery of self-renewing nature that Byron had, in a preceding canto, expressly dissociated from freedom: Yet are thy skies as blue, thy crags as wild; Sweet are thy groves, and verdant are thy fields, Thine olive ripe as when Minerva smil’d, And still his honied wealth Hymettus yields; There the blithe bee his fragrant fortress builds, The freeborn wanderer of thy mountain-air ; Apollo still thy long, long summer gilds, Still in his beam Mendeli’s marbles glare; Art, Glory, Freedom fail, but Nature still is fair.1269

This wavering between confidence and hopelessness, not to be easily imputed to the separate voices of the narrator and the poet in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, will no longer disconcert the reader of Don Juan. The remnants of optimism prominent in the earlier work have dwindled into a humourous acceptance of doubt. In Don Juan, where faith, hope, and confidence only arise to share the Fall of man, Byron rather regrets the indispensability of rebellion and violence1270 as he can no longer deny the strict logic of Godwin’s and Percy Shelley’s brilliant proof that any revolution will necessarily entail new evils instead of improvements. The law of nature noted above, which did not allow the extirpation of one disease without its substitution with another, also proved effective in history. The French Revolution had shown that the tyranny of monarchs was only crumbling, giving way to a new, loathsome form of tyranny : that of the people. Byron’s plain and sworn detestation of “every despotism in every nation”1271 forbade him to celebrate the people, forcing him to offend all parties: I wish men to be free As much from mobs as kings – from you as me.1272

1267 Ibid. 3. 84. 1–9. Also cf. ibid. 4. 98. 1–9. 1268 Ibid. 4. 98. 1–9. Also cf. ibid. 4. 114. 5–6. 1269 Ibid. 2. 87. 1–9. Cf. ibid. 2. 88. 1–9, and, for the thought of nature’s only exemption from time’s ruin, ibid. 3. 27. 1–9 and 3. 30. 1–9. 1270 Byron, Don Juan, 8. 51. 5–6. 1271 Ibid. 9. 24. 8. 1272 Ibid. 9. 25. 7–8. For Byron’s resignation as to the possibility of establishing a non-tyrannical government see his awareness of a people’s republic’s brutality in his Letter to John Murray, 21 February 1820, ed. cit. VII. 44: “If we must have a tyrant – let him at least be a gentleman who has been bred to the business, and let us fall by the axe and not by the butcher’s cleaver.”

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Byron’s sympathy invariably lies with the oppressed rather than the oppressors; an accomplished revolution of the people would turn him from a democrat into a royalist, just as he wavered between Radical Whiggism and Toryism: […] I verily believe if they Who now are basking in their full-blown pride, Were shaken down, and ‘dogs had had their day,’ Though at the first I might perchance deride Their tumble, I should turn the other way, And wax an Ultra-royalist in loyalty, Because I hate even democratic royalty.1273

Again, the Pyrrhonist Byron refused to commit himself to a firm doctrinal position. The just wars by which nations like the Greek were trying to free themselves from foreign yokes may be successful but might ultimately bring about no improvement as tyrants are replaced by the victors in their own countries, through monarchy or democracy. Byron’s participation in the War of Greek Independence was the act of a man who suspected that his act was good but ultimately in vain, that the cause of freedom which his passions drove him to embrace was possibly precipitating the substitution of a new tyranny for an old one. The tragedies of Marino Faliero and Sardanapalus are cases in point, showing the necessary failure of weak, flawed, yet compassionate sovereigns trying to relieve the burdens of their own oppressed subjects. Old Doge Faliero’s indignant denigration of Venetian tyranny and exhortation for political justice sounds noble, yet is motivated by injured aristocratic pride and a desire for personal revenge, and is therefore doomed to fail. Faliero is modelled on Shakespeare’s King Lear, an unwise senex puer and tyrant whose wife Angiolina knows him better than he knows himself. She is both wiser and more self-controlled than her older husband – le monde / l’envers. Fashioning himself as a Christ-like sovereign to the people, Faliero is, in reality, far from the ideal king’s balance between justice and mercy, when he relentlessly demands capital punishment for an immature youth’s minor offence during the Venetian carnival. Faliero’s life finally ends under the executioner’s axe with the full experience of the painful truth that his tyrannical alter ego, the Tribunal of the Forty, is as merciless as himself. He is not the Romantic Prometheus-type but the Romantic Satan-type of rebel against tyranny, himself a tyrant who will not share his power with the Tribunal of the Forty and the Council of the Ten, and 1273 Byron, Don Juan, 15. 23. 2–8. Also cf. Byron, Journal, 16 January 1814, ed. cit. III. 242: “As for me […] I have simplified my politics into an utter detestation of all existing governments; and, as it is the shortest and most agreeable and summary feeling imaginable, the first moment of an universal republic would convert me into an advocate for single and uncontradicted despotism.” Also quoted by Rutherford, Byron: A Critical Study, 193.

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who will wear a king’s crown rather than a doge’s cap. He is thus akin to Byron’s Lucifer and Schiller’s Fiesko, and Heine quoted Byron’s Marino Faliero as expressing his own disillusionment with dreams of political progress. Faliero’s noble revolutionary address to the people is simply another act of mendacious self-fashioning, like his final pose of the wronged Byronic hero: You are met To overthrow this monster of a state, This mockery of a government, this spectre, Which must be exorcised with blood, and then We will renew the times of truth and justice, Condensing in a fair free commonwealth Not rash equality but equal rights, Proportion’d like the columns to the temple, Giving and taking strength reciprocal, And making firm the whole with grace and beauty, So that no part could be removed without Infringement of the general symmetry.1274

Universal human sympathy and memories of childhood, prime agents of millennial regeneration in Positive Romanticism, are the causes of the failure of Faliero’s revolution (and would also derail nobler ones). What had been expected to overcome tyranny became the force that perpetuated it. The plot is discovered by the compassionate plebeian Bertram, who remembers his paradisiacal childhood with the patrician Lioni when social distinctions did not separate man from man. Old Faliero is also himself shaken both by compassion for his innocent subjects, destined to die in the revolution, and by memories of his close friendship with the tyrannical patricians whom he has now decided to kill. His Byronic Weltenklage reveals his hidden, deep-seated scepticism; his doubts of revolutionary hopes as well as his awareness of the futility of bloodshed. Violence will create new violence and new tyrannies, and, if there should be a millennium, violence might prevent it from coming: Oh world! Oh men! what are ye, and our best designs, That we must work by crime to punish crime? And slay as if Death had but this one gate, 1274 Byron, Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice, 1821, III/2, 164–175. Note especially the Doge’s (and Byron’s) brilliantly formulated Radical, yet decidedly anti-levelling and anti-socialist, attitude in line 170: “Not rash equality but equal rights”. For Sardanapalus seeking to rule by love, not force, also see Carlson, In the Theatre of Romanticism, Cambridge 1994, 183. In the wake of Byron’s cyclical view of history, Swinburne wrote his own Negative Romantic tragedy Marino Faliero (1885). In both tragedies, the rebellious doge is symbolically beheaded on the very spot where he had been inaugurated.

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When a few years would make the sword superfluous? And I, upon the verge of the unknown realm, Yet send so many heralds on before me? – I must not ponder this.1275

Sardanapalus is equally compassionate towards his satraps and subjects, though for quite different reasons. His Byronic scepticism and hedonism, which take eating, drinking, and loving as life’s aims in a disorderly world of pain, would admit to neither strict rule nor war in the Kingdom of Assyria. He states his preAristippean and pre-Epicurean philosophy in a memorable dialogue with his traditionalist brother-in–law Salemenes, the basis for the famous inscription on his monument reported to have been found later by the Greeks, and as repeated in Byron’s Don Juan: By Baal, the cities, though well built, Are not more goodly than the verse! Say what Thou wilt ’gainst me, my mode of life or rule, But nothing ’gainst the truth of that brief record. Why, those few lines contain the history Of all things human; hear – ‘Sardanapalus, The king, and son of Anacyndaraxes, In one day built Anchialus and Tarsus. Eat, drink, and love; the rest’s not worth a fillip.’1276

Sardanapalus is thus the opposite of both the Assyrian soldier-hunter-queen Semiramis and a long line of warlike ancestors. But there are two major reasons why his hedonism proves to not offer any solution for his kingdom’s, or the world’s, problems. First, his lax government encourages his subjects to rebel violently, so they storm his palace during a banquet to take his and his Greek slave Myrrha’s lives. Second, Myrrha’s warlike behaviour in the battle reminds us that tyranny provokes wars of liberation, so that Myrrha the freedom fighter resembles Semiramis the tyrant in the cruelty of her actions in the final fight, just as, in Günderrode’s play, the initially sensitive and peaceful Hildegund eventually resembles the tyrant Attila, whom she plans to murder. The antithetically mixed nature of man would turn even women into avengers. Third, the rebellion of his subjects rekindles the warlike instincts inherent in Sardanapalus’s human nature, so that, like Don Juan, the peaceful lover becomes a bloodthirsty soldier. Sardanapalus’s horrid dream of his dead ancestors reveals that they (especially Semiramis) catch up with him to call him to battle, and final destruction.1277 The 1275 Byron, Marino Faliero, IV/2, 166–173. Note the aposiopesis in line 172 underscoring the Doge’s (and Byron’s) scepticism as to the justification of revolutions. 1276 Byron, Sardanapalus, 1821, I/2, 244–252. Cf. Don Juan, 2. 207. 7–8. 1277 Byron, Sardanapalus, IV/1, 116–162.

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Assyrian Empire collapses, and Sardanapalus and Myrrha commit suicide by burning themselves on the Assyrian throne so that, finally, both the dream of peace and the efforts of war prove vain, in confirmation of the biblical Book of Koheleth. Their bodies’, their throne’s, and their empire’s ashes symbolize the fatuousness of man’s aims and the aimlessness of history, which, in a continuous circle, produces empires only to destroy them. In Sardanapalus’s prophetic dying words, there is no way out of the human condition, and no possibility of redemption for mankind: Adieu, Assyria! I loved thee well, my own, my fathers’ land, And better as my country than my kingdom. I satiated thee with peace and joys; and this Is my reward! and now I owe thee nothing, Not even a grave.1278

The fall from illusion to reality, ending in a noble suicide to escape the miseries of existence, may have been the reason why Byron was fascinated with Grillparzer’s tragedy Sappho (1818) noted previously. As long as she is isolated in her Olympic dreams of paradise, the celebrated Greek poet Sappho ignores human nature. But when she descends from her heights, falls in love with Phaon – a beautiful Greek youth of lower origin – and experiences the pangs of jealousy prompted by Phaon’s love for her young slave Melitta, Sappho’s initial egalitarianism and sense of social justice collapse. She turns into a tyrant, and almost a murderess, aware that her very human desire for terrestrial love and glory is about to destroy her life. As in all Byron’s and Grillparzer’s plays, the autonomy of action proves to be one of mankind’s self-delusions. Neither man nor woman can change things as they are. The resplendent Hellas of Weimar Classicism, which shapes the play’s beginning, turns into the chaos and nightmare at the play’s end. In Byron’s dramas, Godwin’s and Percy Shelley’s millennium of lasting peace and political justice appears as one of those splendid illusions which first deceive man with their visionary lustre before vanishing like airy bubbles when put to the test of reality. This is also the case in his Oriental Tales. Selim shares Faliero’s and Sardanapalus’s love of freedom,1279 but he knows that his pirates, firmly resolved to shatter Giaffir’s tyranny, only […] ease their hearts with prate Of equal rights, which man ne’er knew ;1280

1278 Ibid. V/1, 492–497. 1279 Byron, The Bride of Abydos, 2. 387. 1280 Ibid. 2. 385–386.

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The tragic end of their noble conspiracy proves him right. And, if Selim feels sceptical of a better future, old Francesco Foscari advocates Byron’s own mature, pessimistic position.1281 Foscari’s long speech about the black nature of man and the world,1282 the former without will and the latter without hope, exposes all the vanity and inefficiency of his daughter-in–law Marina’s passionate outcries against Venetian tyranny. Her function in the play is to articulate the vain hopes of Positive Romanticism, liberation, and meliorism as mythicized in the unbinding of Prometheus. The tragedy’s bleak d8nouement proves her wrong, although she is the strongest character in the play and, like Beethoven’s Lenore, a promising (though ultimately failing) female saviour. She may boldly denounce tyranny and step into the darkest chambers of horror and torture fearlessly, but she cannot effect change any more than the noble old Doge. She must finally accept the unalterable truth that all men act like puppets moved on strings, or like animals obeying irrational instincts. Her father-in–law is the slave rather than the lord of Venetian jurisdiction, and her husband follows mere instinct when he voluntarily returns to imprisonment and torture in Venice. Men are slaves, the greatest as the meanest,1283 and there is no freedom but in death.1284 As usual, Lermontov, the “double Byron”, was more radical in doubting dialectical progress. The young Russian dragoon’s poem prophesying the future, @aVUb[QnQ^YV (MS 1830), inverts the millennial visions of Positive Romanticism by expressing similar fears for the future of Russia, just as Byron prophecied for the future of all Europe. The Tsar’s tyranny would fall to give way to the tyranny not of the people but of another strong man with another knife in his hand, equally indifferent to the suffering of the people – a Russian Napoleon. All the death and bloodshed on that black day of Russia would then be in vain.1285 There was nothing in Byron or Lermontov of Charlotte Bront[’s later Victorian confidence in vanquishing the adversity of a tyrannical fate, of reaping the fruits of persistent effort and wholehearted commitment both in love and war. This is seen at the end of her novel Shirley (1849), where the incessant exertions of Caroline Helstone and Louis Moore to win the love of Robert and Shirley are rewarded by two marriages on the day that news reaches England of Napoleon’s defeat at Salamanca, the requital of national effort and endurance. In Byron’s Romantic Disillusionism dreams of amorous and political success appear as equally fallacious. Strictly speaking, at no time in his life was Byron the man to act and fight for 1281 1282 1283 1284

Lansdown, Byron’s Historical Dramas, Oxford 1992, 195. Byron, The Two Foscari, II/1, 332–365. Ibid. II/1, 357–8. Ibid. IV/1, 193. Francesco Foscari comments on his exiled son Jacopo’s sudden death: “He’s free”. 1285 Lermontov, @aVUb[QnQ^YV, posth. 1862, in: Gedichte, 30–31.

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his ideals of freedom with wholehearted commitment and firm confidence of success. Either one or the other was found wanting. In his earlier period when he still exhorted the possibility of improving the world by chasing tyrants from their thrones, his emotional, revolutionary ardour had stood in evident contrast to, and been rendered impotent by, his rational Childe-Harold-like and Napoleon-Bonaparte-like contempt for ordinary humanity and retreat from society.1286 He lacked that remarkable compromise of Robert Browning’s Paracelsus “At once to trample on, yet save mankind”,1287 the Byronic pose combined with Victorian social responsibility in a hubristic man of genius who, like the Byronic hero, aspires for more than he can attain. The sympathy with which Byron proposed to treat the inhuman cruelties of the old tyrant Tiberius, the despiser of mankind, reveals what he feared as being the final outcome of his own life’s tragedy.1288 However, Rutherford goes awry when he proceeds to subjective judgments, rejecting Byron’s complacent self-isolation as morally disreputable and welcoming the War of Greek Independence as a final chance, which Byron fortunately took, to redefine himself and reshape his indolent life in accordance with his poetic-political ideals.1289 In his Greek adventure, Byron again instinctively followed a short-lived dream that his reason told him to be illusory without enabling him to act more wisely. After the failure of the 1821 uprising, when Teresa Guiccioli’s family, the Gambas, were exiled, he felt increasingly bored with his role as cavalier servente and household pet, and his erotic penchant for adolescent Eastern boys returned.1290 The past, he argued, is the best prophet of the future, and what predominates in memory of the past is “Hope baffled”:1291 1286 See Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 3. 12. 1–9. Note the haughtiness of the intellectual rebel and his disdain of the less aspiring multitude as beings of a heavier dust and lower order; cf. especially Manfred’s proud rejection of the Chamois Hunter’s humble, pious, healthy, and innocent life (Byron, Manfred, II/1, 1–94). The same cynical stance Byron admired as well as regretted in Napoleon – admired because it was wise to feel like a cynic, and regretted because it was unwise to show his contempt (Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 3. 40. 1–9). Napoleon could not openly mock at men like Diogenes and yet claim the whole earth for his empire instead of a tub (ibid. 3. 41. 8–9). Lady Blessington, to whom Byron vindicated his own and Napoleon’s contempt for mankind, correctly perceived that Byron did not feel the way he thought (Blessington, Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. cit. 82). 1287 Browning, Paracelsus, 1835, line 461, in: Poetical Works 1833–1864, ed. Jack, Oxford Standard Authors, London 1970, 51. 1288 Byron, Ravenna Journal, 28 January 1821, VIII. 36–37. Byron’s mild treatment of Tiberius is the more remarkable for its occurrence at a time when the picture of Tiberius was still dominated by the denigrations of hostile aristocratic partisans, Tacitus, Suetonius, and Cassius Dio, thirty years before Stahr and Mommsen corrected the image of the cruel bloodthirsty old tyrant. 1289 Rutherford, Byron: A Pilgrim’s Progress, 22. 1290 Crompton, Byron and Greek Love, 312–313. 1291 Byron, Ravenna Journal, 28 January 1821, VIII. 37.

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Ergo, in all human affairs, it is Hope – Hope – Hope. I allow sixteen minutes, though I never counted them, to any given or supposed possession. From whatever place we commence, we know where it all must end. And yet, what good is there in knowing it? It does not make men better or wiser.1292

Byron’s death for Greece at Missolonghi was not the deliberate self-sacrifice of a true “martyr … in the cause of freedom” who gave away his life “for the last, best hopes of man”,1293 as William Hazlitt had apologetically misconstrued it under the first shock of the news, nor was it the final evidence of any unconscious optimism behind a facade of conscious pessimism,1294 as Gilbert Keith Chesterton equally misconstrued it with his hilarious sense of paradox. It was rather the abridgement of the pangs of a man who had perfected scepticism and pessimism so as to leave next to no hope in a dark, unreformable world, and for whom it had become time to die: My days are in the yellow leaf; The flowers and fruits of love are gone; The worm, the canker, and the grief Are mine alone! Tread those reviving passions down, Unworthy manhood! – unto thee Indifferent should the smile or frown Of beauty be. If thou regrett’st thy youth, why live? The land of honourable death Is here: – up to the field, and give Away thy breath! Seek out – less often sought than found – A soldier’s grave, for thee the best; Then look around, and choose thy ground, And take thy rest.1295

The reference is to Loukas Chalandritsanos, the fifteen-year-old Peloponnesian boy whom Byron kept as a page behind the frontlines and who, unlike the 1292 Ibid. 1293 Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age, or, Contemporary Portraits, 1825, in: Complete Works, ed. P.P. Howe, London 1930–1934, XI. 78. The misconception of Byron’s heroic self-sacrifice is still to be found in E.F. Boyd, Byron’s Don Juan: A Critical Study, 161–162. 1294 Chesterton, Twelve Types, The Optimism of Byron, 1902, in: Byron: The Critical Heritage, ed. A. Rutherford, London 1970, 484–485. 1295 Byron, On this Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year, MS Missolonghi 22 January 1824, lines 5–8 and 29–40.

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previous adolescents subject to his romantic advances, no longer requited the love of the now ageing poet, growing grey and obese:1296 Byron’s ideal death, as expressed in this famous lyric, was to leave the world like his Sardanapalus, rallying all his strength and determination to tread down those reviving passions befitting youth but not manhood. This was unlike Belshazzar, Sardanapalus’s antitype, who in viewing approaching death would not relinquish the sensual fullness of his banquet, dash the roses from his grey hair, and admit that his “soul expired ere youth decay’d” to leave him “but a mass of earth”.1297 “Unfit to govern, live, or die”,1298 Belshazzar had failed to at least snatch the final triumph of dying like a soldier if he could no longer live like a lover – to abandon one passion for another and pluck bright honour from the pale-faced moon like Shakespeare’s Percy Hotspur, though it be merely another meteor or ignis fatuus. This was the major reason why Byron gave up his Italian banquet to end his life as a soldier in Greece. It counts as being among the most tragic aspects of his life that Byron lived to see even this last wish – to find a soldier’s end – thwarted by fate. It was neither involuntary death nor suicidal daring on the battlefield that terminated his painful career but instead a vulgar fever aggravated by the absurd, one-sided love of a hustler boy, as well as by incompetent leeches.1299 His passing resembled that of his friend John Wingfield of the Guards1300 as lamented in the first canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage:1301 empty, pointless, and baffled in even achieving the vain and fleeting lustre of military glory.1302 It also has affinities with the unspectacular death of Alp the Renegade, which gives the lie to his spectacular life dedicated to love and glory, motivated by the contrary passions of tenderness and hatred.1303 Moreover, Byron’s last poem was not the much-quoted “On this Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year”, but his equally desperate, though more outspoken, homoerotic love-poems “Last Words” and “Love and Death”, addressed to Loukas Chalandritsanos.1304 The last stanza of “Love and Death”, probably the last lines Byron ever wrote, resume his pervading theme of man’s weak will, love’s vanity and danger, and the futility of life:

1296 Crompton, Byron and Greek Love, 322, and MacCarthy, Byron: Life and Legend, 499–501. 1297 Byron, To Belshazzar, lines 19–20. 1298 Ibid. line 24. For Byron’s interest in the subject-matter see also his Vision of Belshazzar in: Hebrew Melodies (1815). 1299 Marchand, Byron: A Portrait, 452–460. 1300 Died of fever at Coimbra, 14 May 1811. John Wingfield, Byron’s school-fellow at Harrow, had been commemorated as Alonso in Hours of Idleness, Childish Recollections, lines 243–264. 1301 Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 1. 91. 1–9. 1302 Ibid. 2. 2. 1–9 and 2. 5. 1–9. 1303 Byron, The Siege of Corinth (1816), lines 822–851. 1304 Crompton, Byron and Greek Love, 326–331.

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Thus much and more – and yet thou lov’st me not, And never wilt – Love dwells not in our will – Nor can I blame thee – though it be my lot To strongly – wrongly – vainly – love thee still.1305

The suppression of this poem in earlier editions and the publisher’s misleading apology on its publication in 1887 bear witness to the endeavours of Byron’s literary executors to inscribe a purpose into his life, raising him to the pedestal of a champion of liberty and hero of Greece. Both European Philhellenists and those later Liberals who continued to believe in the success of their efforts spun the Negative into a Positive Romantic. In a way, Byron enacted what Tieck’s weary and guilt-ridden William Lovell had ultimately decided to do, consciously deceiving himself (and the world) in seeking death for a good patriotic cause: Ich fahre von hier nach Amerika. Der Krieg lockt mich dahin; es wird in der englischen Armee wohl eine Stelle für einen Lebenssatten übrig sein, der sich dann wenigstens noch einbilden kann, zum Besten seines Vaterlandes zu sterben.1306

Stendhal understood Byron’s death perfectly well. Planning to become an author himself, Stendhal admired his co-exile Byron and could literally have fallen on his knees when he first met him in Milan’s Teatro della Scala in 1816.1307 Octave de Malivert, the brilliant young Bourbon Restoration dandy of his first novel, Armance (1827), follows Byron’s lead and goes to Greece to die, but not for any cause other than his own ennui and disgust with the world. His impotence symbolizes his inability to clear misunderstandings and steer his own course in life, being blindly driven, along with his beloved Armance, by mere selfishness, the typically Stendhalian erotic and social “chasse au bonheur”. The tortuous efforts to prove that Byron atoned for his scandalous life through noble, heroic self-sacrifice seem just as ineradicable as the equally mistaken attempts to demonstrate that he made up for his allegedly shallow philosophy with brilliant poetical eloquence.1308 Goethe, though labouring somewhat under the latter error, was too honest and broad-minded to feel obliged to justify Byron on such doubtful grounds. He perceived, quite correctly,

1305 1306 1307 1308

Byron, Love and Death, MS 1824, lines 21–24, in Complete Poetical Works, VII. 82. Tieck, William Lovell, 1795–1796, ed. cit. 649. Clara Tuite, Lord Byron and Scandalous Celebrity, 44–63. E. g. Sir Herbert Grierson, Byron and English Society, 1922, in: The Background of English Literature, London1925, 199: “Against all his shortcomings as a man it is only fair to set the service he strove to render to the cause of freedom and justice in Italy and in Greece, the fact that he did after all lay down his life for his fellow-men.” For a clear-sighted (though prejudiced) anticipation of such apologetic misconstructions see Robert Southey, Letter to Henry Taylor, 26 May 1824, in: Byron: The Critical Heritage, 266–267.

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that there was something impure in Byron’s Greek adventure1309 and that it resulted from a self-destructive impulse rather than an act of rational decision making or noble motivation.1310 Passion being uncontrollable, both in his life and (in his view) of man in general, he could not help but act as his Don Juan had acted, following honour and his nose, albeit with John Johnson’s mature, disappointed, unenthusiastic sang froid. Byron’s tragedy, Goethe justly remarked, consisted in his inability to impose similar constraints upon his life as he had effectually imposed upon his dramas: Daß er dies nicht konnte, war sein Verderben, and es läßt sich sehr wohl sagen, daß er an seiner Zügellosigkeit zu Grunde gegangen ist.1311

The apologists who excuse Byron’s life by his death usually ignore Mary Shelley’s portrait of Raymond in The Last Man: a disillusioned lover and soldier whose death in Greece is both unspectacular and senseless, much like his wife Perdita’s senseless suicide, which also occurs in Greece.1312 Here, Greece has ceased to be the country of Percy Shelley’s Hellas (MS 1822), a symbol of heroism, regeneration, and Paradise Regained. Centuries later, the War of Greek Independence against the Turks is ongoing, and the Greeks have mythified the insignificant soldier into a national hero.1313 Byron was pessimistic about a longlasting Greek independence, and the idealism of Mavrocordatos and such philhellenes as Colonel Leicester Stanhope crowding in Missolonghi, “the LempriHre dictionary quotation Gentlemen”, clashed with his disillusioned view of the future of Greece either under Turkish or under European ancien-r8gime rule.1314 History proved him right. Moreover, his apologists ignore Lady Blessington’s trustworthy statement of how coldly Byron spoke of his Greek adventure, a passage that reminds us of the sang froid of Johnson’s military engagement in Ismail.1315 Byron, like Johnson, while fighting for a good cause was intellectually convinced that his victory or defeat would leave things essentially unimproved, a mature conviction which again stood in diametrical opposition

1309 Friedrich von Müller, 13 June 1824, in: Goethes Gespräche, III. 120: “Sein griechisches Unternehmen hat etwas Unreines gehabt, hätte nie gut endigen können.” 1310 Johann Peter Eckermann, 24 February 1825, ibid. III. 163: “Es war ihm überall zu enge, und bei der grenzenlosesten persönlichen Freiheit fühlte er sich beklommen; die Welt war ihm ein Gefängnis. Sein Gehen nach Griechenland war kein freiwilliger Entschluß, sein Mißverhältnis mit der Welt trieb ihn dazu.” 1311 Ibid. 1312 M. Shelley, The Last Man, ed. cit. 213–215. 1313 Ibid. 165. 1314 Byron, Letter to John Bowring, 30 March 1824, in: Letters and Journals, XI. 147. See also Byron, Letter to Prince Alexander Mavrocordatos, 2 December 1823, XI. 71. 1315 Blessington, Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. cit. 85.

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to his feelings, and which again damped all enthusiasm, both his own and that of his readers: There is something so exciting in the idea of the greatest poet of his day sacrificing his fortune, his occupations, his enjoyments, – in short, offering up on the altar of Liberty all the immense advantages which station, fortune, and genius can bestow, that it is impossible to reflect on it without admiration; but when one hears this same person calmly talk of the worthlessness of the people he proposes to make those sacrifices for, the loans he means to advance, the uniforms he intends to wear, entering into petty details, and always with perfect sang froid, one’s admiration evaporates […]1316

In Mary Shelley’s second novel, Valperga (1823), Byron was the model for the ruthless, backward, fourteenth-century male autocrat Castruccio Castracani, Prince of Lucca. As a Ghibelline supporting the power of the Roman-German Empire over the Italian states, he is contrasted with Euthanasia dei Adimari, a Guelf and modern Liberal who stands for freedom and democracy. Driven by his passions, Castruccio fights for power and glory and does not even dream of selfsacrifice, whereas Euthanasia fights for the cause of liberty and sacrifices her love to her cause. But her virtue goes unrewarded. At the end of the novel, Euthanasia (her telling name suggesting goodness and death) embarks on a journey on storm-tossed waters, and the all-destructive ocean swallows her, as it would ultimately swallow Byron’s Childe Harold. In the historical novel’s typical parallel to its time of writing, the years after the Congress of Vienna, all previous hopes for liberty and democracy perish together with Euthanasia. History merely repeats itself in absurd circles, and human effort and suffering have no melioristic aim: She […] was never heard of more; even her name perished. She slept in the oozy cavern of the ocean; the sea-weed was tangled with her shining hair ; and the spirits of the deep wondered that the earth had trusted so lovely a creature to the barren bosom of the sea, which, as an evil step-mother, deceives and betrays all committed to her care. Earth felt no change when she died, and men forgot her.1317

Castruccio’s death in succumbing to a fever is anti-climactic with relation to his heroic aspirations for love and glory, just as Byron’s was destined to be two years later. All things regress to their old order, as Castruccio must admit in his prophetic dying words in Italian: “Io morrk, e vedrete il mondo per varie turbolenze confondersi, e rivolarsi ogna cosa”.1318 The heroic inscription on the 1316 Ibid. For the damping of Byron’s fervour of enterprise and ardour of imagination by his dissenting rational convictions see also his lyric poem to the moon quoted above, and his Letter to John Cam Hobhouse, 3 October 1819, in: Letters and Journals, VI. 226: “My taste for revolution is abated, – with my other passions.” 1317 M. Shelley, Valperga, 1823, ed. cit. 436–437. 1318 Ibid. 440–441.

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long-forgotten Castruccio’s tombstone “may serve for the moral and conclusion of this tale”, and ends Mary Shelley’s novel on a note of irony.1319 It was only after sending the Valperga manuscript to London in 1822 that Mary Shelley read Ugo Foscolo’s disillusionist novel Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (1802, 1817), with its setting in the Euganean Hills described by Byron. The novel’s message and the fate of its suicidal hero, the senselessness of life and all efforts of liberation would have reminded her of the message of her own work. Felicia Hemans seems to have taken a similar feminist view of Byron when, in “The Sceptic” (MS 1819), she expressed a qualified admiration for his heroism. Like Mary Shelley, she constructed the Protean Byron as a retrograde Tory rather than a Radical Whig. His martial poses could easily be read as non-verbal mockery of the sense of any attempt at trying to establish human freedom in the long run or to alter human history for the better. As in her much-quoted short poem “Casabianca” (1826), heroic patriotism and spectacular self-sacrifice appear as theatrically sublime, though ultimately vain: In the pride Of youth and health, by sufferings yet untried, We talk of Death, as something, which ’twere sweet In Glory’s arms exultingly to meet, A closing triumph, a majestic scene, Where gazing nations watch the hero’s mien, As, undismay’d amidst the tears of all, He folds his mantle, regally to fall!1320

Nevertheless, the sheer enthusiasm of European Romantic Philhellenism fashioned Byron into a martyr-hero that he never was. Poets like Hazlitt, Freiligrath, Musset, and Wilhelm Müller, the sceptic would-believer who succeeded in persuading Goethe to surrender his doubts about Byron’s heroic death, allowed their enthusiasm to blind them to the obvious facts. Byron’s quite unheroic, passive suicide was thus glossed over by the worship of a constructed hero who chose to forgo the pleasures of love for the hardships of war, vice for virtue, egoism for altruism, ennui for action, and Teresa Guiccioli for Greece, although congenial Romantic Disillusionists sensed Byron’s impulsive to put an end to his unconquerable ennui: Lorsque le grand Byron allait quitter Ravenne Et chercher sur les mers quelque plage lointaine OF finir en h8ros son immortel ennui, Comme il 8tait assis aux pieds de sa ma%tresse, P.le, et d8j/ tourn8e du cot8 de la GrHce, 1319 Ibid. 441. 1320 Hemans, The Sceptic, 1820, lines 351–8, ed. cit. n.p.

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Celle qu’il appelait alors sa Guiccioli […]1321

Goethe also ended up introducing Byron into the second part of his Faust (1832) as Euphorion, the son of Faust (Romanticism) and Helena (Classicism), tracing his life from birth and childhood to premature death. Dismissing the now experienced Faust’s call for moderation, Euphorion’s craving for fame and glory leads to his inevitable death.1322 This again sounds like the Classicist’s distanced and critical view of Byron’s death, but Goethe’s earlier poetical obituary to the poet’s death, written under the influence of Wilhelm Müller, served the Romantic Philhellenic commonplace that shaped Byron’s image both in Greece and with Liberals all over Europe, including England, Germany, and Poland: Stark von Faust, gewand im Rat Liebt er die Hellenen; Edles Wort und schöne Tat, Füllt sein Aug’ mit Tränen. Liebt den Säbel, liebt das Schwert, Freut sich der Gewehre; Säh’ er, wie sein Herz begehrt, Sich vor mut’gem Heere! Laßt ihn der Historia, Bändigt euer Sehnen, Ewig bleibt ihm Gloria, Bleiben uns die Tränen.1323

The Polish Romantics, united in their opposition to the division of Poland between Russia, Austria, and Prussia, revered Byron, who pleaded for the restoration of a free Polish-Lithuanian state both in Don Juan and The Age of Bronze.1324 They translated his works into Polish and mourned his death in Greece as a deliberate self-sacrifice. Adam Mickiewicz’s narrative poem Konrad Wallenrod (1828) figures a fourteenth-century Byronic hero who, disguised as a Teutonic Knight, works his way to the top of the order, brings about the defeat of the German oppressors of Poland-Lithuania, and commits suicide on being discovered. But, as George Sand correctly observed, Konrad Wallenrod knows 1321 Musset, Lettre / M. de Lamartine, 1 March 1836, lines 1–6, in: Po8sies complHtes, 328. 1322 Frank Erik Pointner – Achim Geisenhanslüke, The Reception of Byron in the GermanSpeaking Lands, in: The Reception of Byron in Europe, II. 255. 1323 Goethe, An Lord Byron, June 1825, in: Sämtliche Werke, ed. cit. II. 703–704. 1324 Hoffmeister, Byron und der europäische Byronismus, 90–91, and Mirosława Modrzewska, Pilgrimage or Revolt? The Dilemmas of Polish Byronism, in: The Reception of Byron in Europe, II. 305–15.

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his God and is no sceptic like the Byronic heroes.1325 This distinguishes Mickiewicz’s Konrad from his literary model and namesake, Byron’s Conrad the Corsair, who enters the Turkish Pasha’s service disguised as a dervish to bring about his army’s defeat. Whereas Conrad serves his own interests as a pirate, Konrad serves his people and country. Mickiewicz’s narrative promoted the Polish November 1830 Uprising against Russian rule, firing a Polish Byronomania that misunderstood Byron, just as Greek Byronomania did (and still does). However, there were Polish Romantic Pyrrhonists who understood Byron’s message better than Mickiewicz. The most outstanding of these was Juliusz Słowacki, who broke and quarrelled with his former friend and political ally Mickiewicz over his doubt of a better future and the positive role of the Polish gentry in his sceptical works such as the drama Kordian (1834) and the digressive verse epic Beniowski (1841–1846), the latter being a version of Byron’s Don Juan.1326 It ends on a note of Romantic Irony, with a tongue-in–cheek profession of belief in the immortality of the Polish Seym or Parliament moved to Paris after the failed 1830–1831 uprising, followed by an “Amen!” stuck in the throat like Macbeth’s: In communing with the spirit of the nation: Absolving the great leaders of our choosing, Herod will bless our great Seym’s congregation – He finds this sacred parliament amusing. Its rising up will furnish confirmation Of Resurrection (otherwise confusing); And last I add here, freed from doubt infernal, That I believe in our Seym’s life eternal.1327

Such Byronic Pyrrhonism did not pass uncontradicted in divided Poland fervently hoping for a new Polish national state. In his novel Bajronista (1857), Zygmunt Kaczkowski demonstrated the disastrous effect of Byron’s and Słowacki’s doubts of traditional virtue and Polish nationalism on a young man named Miron (possibly a portmanteau of Mickiewicz and Byron). Kaczkowski intensely disliked such Byronic doubt as expressed by Słowacki: Ah, Nymph! I must avow That I too caught the malady systemic, 1325 Hoffmeister, Byron und der europäische Byronismus, 93. 1326 See Monika Coghen, Polish Romanticism, in: The Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism, 568. 1327 Słowacki, Beniowski, 5. 54. 1–8, 1841–1846, in: Poland’s Angry Romantic: Two Poems and a Play by Juliusz Słowacki, transl. Mirosława Modrzewska – Peter Cochran, Newcastle 2009, 299.

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And am by now (the devil! – I’m no ironist) No longer Polish – but a Byronist.1328

Misunderstanding of Byron as being a believer in and champion of a better future through national liberation was widespread. His arch-enemy Robert Southey proved prophetic when he unceremonially regretted Byron’s premature death in the War of Greek Independence for the sole reason that it would turn a dangerous sceptic and spoiler into a martyr for freedom. The public would either forget the plain facts or excuse an erratic life by an allegedly noble heroic death: We shall now hear his praises from all quarters. I dare say he will be held up as a martyr to the cause of liberty, as having sacrificed his life by his exertions in behalf of the Greeks. Upon this score the liberals will beatify him […] I am sorry for his death therefore, because it comes in aid of a pernicious reputation […]1329

Just as in the case of Napoleon, Byron’s shameful exile and unheroic death signalled the creation of a modern cult of scandalous notoriety, fascinating millions with its new type of antithetically-mixed hero.1330

1328 Ibid. 1. 25. 5–8, ed. cit. 177. 1329 Southey, Letter to Henry Taylor, 26 May 1824, in: The Life and Correspondence of the Late Robert Southey, ed. C.C. Southey, London 1849–1850, I. 178–179. 1330 Clara Tuite, Byron and Scandalous Celebrity, 93–95.

VI

Doubt of Resurrection and Regeneration: Cultural Pessimism

The Platonic and Christian dialectical readings of the symbolism of the day and seasons – slow decay and death followed by regeneration to a higher life – had already been doubted by Senancour’s Oberman. In his mal du siHcle, he experienced nothing but slow decay, both in human life and human history, in letters that exclude all thoughts of the days’ or seasons’ regeneration as applicable to man. Platonic dialectic is incomplete, and all thesis ends in final antithesis – a view diametrically opposed to that of the believing addressee of Oberman’s letters. Ennui, die Krankheit zum Tode, replaces Christian consolation in the Christian doctrine of mors est porta vitae: J’ai vu la vall8e doucement 8clair8e dans l’ombre, sous le voile humide, charme vaporeux du matin; elle 8tait belle. Je l’ai vue changer et se fl8trir : l’astre qui consume a pass8 sur elle; il l’a embras8e, il l’a fatigu8e de lumiHre; il l’a laiss8e sHche, vieillie et d’une st8rilit8 p8nible / voir. Ainsi s’est lev8 lentement, ainsi s’est dissip8 le voile heureux de nos jours. […] Voil/ plusieurs ann8es que le mal menace, se pr8pare, se d8cide, se fixe. Si le malheur du moins ne vient rompre cet uniforme ennui, il faudra que tout cela finisse.1331

Grillparzer’s Schicksalstragödie Die Ahnfrau (1817), a classical drama restricted to one plot, place, and time – a dark winter’s evening and night – is about the elimination of an old aristocratic family. The Schicksalstragödie, a German variant of the Gothic drama, called up the Greek tragedy of the Classical Tradition with its concept of an Olympic fate in order to subvert its Olympic faith. In a historical parallel, old Earl Borotin’s attempts to negate ghosts and exorcise his presentiments of the extinction of his family fail, signaling the end of the Enlightenment. Contrary to his daughter Berta’s belief in universal regeneration, Borotin is doomed to see the justness of his unconquerable, irrational fears that the Borotin ancestral tree will grow no more branches to generate descendants. The imagery of the barren and uprooted Stammbaum does not only apply to the 1331 Senancour, Oberman, 1804, letter 39, sixth year, ed. cit. 176–177.

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long death-struggle of the decadent aristocracy after the Congress of Vienna, as do the vampire novels and tales, but to families and civilizations in general. In Borotin’s initial speech in the empty hall of his decaying castle, Grillparzer echoed Byron’s above-quoted “The tree will wither long before it fall”: Nun, wohlan, was muss, geschehe! Fallen seh ich Zweig auf Zweige, Kaum noch hält der morsche Stamm; Noch ein Schlag, so fällt auch dieser, Und im Staube liegt die Eiche, Die die reichen Segensäste Weit gebreitet ringsumher.1332

In a subversive poem in G8rard de Nerval’s Les ChimHres (1854), the suffering Christ is made to witness the absence of God, the blind will of destiny and contingency, the lack of any world spirit, the senselessness of sacrifice, the meaninglessness of the rainbow, and that worlds and civilizations pass and die without resurrection. What grows on their tombs and from their ashes are simply other individuals and worlds, new civilizations superseding the old, perished ones, as in Byron’s Don Juan and Mary Shelley’s The Last Man. “Le Christ aux Oliviers” is a heretical, intertextual rewriting of Christ’s Passion through a rereading of Madame de Sta[l’s reading of Jean Paul’s “Rede des toten Christus” (1796), with its / rebours reading in turn of the Gospels of the New Testament: ‘Immobile Destin, muette sentinelle, Froide N8cessit8! … Hasard qui t’avanÅant Parmi les mondes morts sous la neige 8ternelle, Refroidis, par degr8s l’univers p.lissant, Sais-tu ce que tu fais, puissance originelle, De tes soleils 8teints, l’un l’autre se froissant … Es-tu s0r de transmettre une haleine immortelle, Entre un monde qui meurt et l’autre renaissant? …’1333

Three years later in Les fleurs du mal (1857), Baudelaire represented human beings as ants in an anthill, busily following their instincts in their daily or nightly pursuits for their ephemeral sustenance without any distinction between moral or immoral, respectable or criminal work, all being washed down by 1332 Grillparzer, Die Ahnfrau, 1817, I/1, 1–8, in: Werke, I. 11. 1333 Nerval, Les ChimHres, Le Christ aux Oliviers, lines 29–36, ed. cit. I. 7. As, later, in the poetry of Baudelaire, Nerval’s sacrilegious messages are contrasted against traditional forms, here in the form of sonnets, in an attempt at giving form to chaos and providing himself and his readers temporary salvation by art. For more detailed interpretations see F. Burwick, Poetic Madness and the Romantic Imagination, 229–253.

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relentless natural powers into the same abyss, never to return (“le gouffre commun”). The speaker-poet, who observes this chaotic anthill and noisy jungle of seething Paris, stands apart, isolated and lonely like all others, helplessly closing his ears to the noise and cries of anguish. Christian community is nonexistent in the modern industrial metropolis, and the Christian reminder of the grave, “memente homo quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris”, has become a radicalized Byronic reminder of common, non-regenerative destruction. The changing anthill, “la fourmiliHre”, in which dead bodies were laid to prepare their skeletons, associates death as the ultimate reality behind all life:1334 Recueille-toi, mon .me, en ce grave moment, Et ferme ton oreille / ce rugissement. C’est l’heure oF les douleurs des malades s’aigrissent! La sombre Nuit les prend / la gorge; ils finissent Leur destin8e et vont vers le gouffre commun.1335

The speakers of Nerval’s and Baudelaire’s poems deny identical resurrection in general, just as the speaker of Emily Bront[’s poem “Death” doubts personal resurrection in particular : Strike it down – that other boughs may flourish Where that perished sapling used to be; Thus at least, its mouldering corpse will nourish That from which it sprung – Eternity –1336

Thomas Lovell Beddoes’s best-known poem, “Dream-Pedlary” (MS 1829–1844), debases the consolations of religion, including an identical personal resurrection, to worthless goods peddled in the streets by dishonest vagrant salemen to the gullible. One piece of merchandise after another proves to be of no value, but the pedlars will return, and people will again buy their trash because they dream of a better human condition both here and hereafter. Each offer begins with an irrealis, suggesting man’s wishful thinking to be the origin of religions: If there are ghosts to raise, What shall I call, Out of hell’s murky haze, Heaven’s blue hall? Raise my beloved long-lost boy 1334 Baudelaire’s friend, the Belgian engraver and painter F8licien Rops, thus illustrated Les fleurs du mal as a masquerade of death. 1335 Baudelaire; Les fleurs du mal, Tableaux parisiens, Le cr8puscule du soir’, lines 29–33, in: Œuvres complHtes, 91. 1336 E. Bront[, Death, MS 17 April 1845, lines 29–32, in: Poems, ed. cit. 168. For the same image of a merely natural and ever-repetitive manuring cycle see Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, ed. cit. II. 635.

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To lead me to his joy. There are no ghosts to raise; Out of death lead no ways; Vain is the call.1337

If there was a resurrection of the dead, Beddoes suggested in another poem, “Doomsday” (MS 1829–1844), the good and the bad, benefactors and murderers alike, would arise and none higher than the ground above his coffin.1338 There cannot be a Judgment Day if there is neither a natural moral law (as Pyrrho argued against Plato) nor a metaphysical superstructure. The preacher in the dark, hollow church with the depressed, broken community in James Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night (1874) is not a pedlar of dreams but an honest revealer of the vanity of his modern congregation’s residual wishful thinking: ‘This little life is all we must endure, The grave’s most holy peace is ever sure, We fall asleep and never wake again; Nothing is of us but the mouldering flesh, Whose elements dissolve and merge afresh In earth, air, water, plants, and other men.’1339

In his novels the Marquis de Sade had pushed this Holbachian view of matter forever dissolving and rearranging itself into new forms to its furthest conclusion. If there is neither a hierarchy nor an ethical law in the material world, nor a spiritual world beyond matter, the matricide that Monsieur de Bressac argues for in Les infortunes de la vertu (MS 1787) – the murder of his mother that transforms her flesh into worms and insects – cannot be classified as an unnatural act.1340 On the contrary, it is natural in the sense of nature being a simple machine for reprocessing, accelerating the operations of “la nature toujours cr8atrice”.1341 Like dead animals and plants returned to the ground, man’s mortal remains will become manure for new life. The wild girl in George Meredith’s “Love in the Valley” (1851) will die and never be reborn as such, like the wild trees and flowers of which she forms part in the speaker’s neopagan negation of a natura humana separata and sympathy with wild, as opposed to domesticated, nature.1342 And in Swinburne’s “A Forsaken Garden” (1878), even nature itself is doomed to death. 1337 1338 1339 1340 1341 1342

Beddoes, Dream-Pedlary, lines 29–37, in: Selected Poetry, ed. cit. 31. Beddoes, Doomsday, ed. cit. 28–29. Thomson B.V., The City of Dreadful Night, XIV. 49–54, ed. cit. I. 155. De Sade, Les infortunes de la vertu, in: Œuvres, ed. cit. II. 35. Ibid. Meredith, Poems, Love in the Valley, 2nd version, lines 185–208, in: Poems, ed. Phyllis B. Bartlett, New Haven and London 1978, I. 256–257.

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The speaker’s dying garden, isolated “In a coign of the cliff”,1343 itself a perversion of the paradisiacal Judaeo-Christian “hortus conclusus” with its symbolism of fruitfulness and creative order, is slowly drawn back into the sea that brought it forth, “la mer fatale” as “la mHre fatale”, Niobe or Demeter-Ceres or Althea – first giving, then finally taking, life. As opposed to Percy Shelley’s destroying and preserving west wind, Swinburne’s sea wind is neither revitalizing inspiration nor regeneration, but simple destruction. Christ, the “God selfslain on his own strange altar”, has not vanquished death in his own and saved mankind’s resurrection, but is himself the victim of triumphant death: Till the slow sea rise and the sheer cliff crumble, Till terrace and meadow the deep gulfs drink, Till the strength of the waves of the high tides humble The fields that lessen, the rocks that shrink, Here now in his triumph where all things falter, Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread, As a god self-slain on his own strange altar, Death lies dead.1344

Swinburne’s destructive wind finds a counterpart in Poe’s claustrophobic lack of wind, as both deny or pervert the biblical “divine inspiration”. The ancient languages have identical words for “wind”, “breath”, and “spirit” or “inspiration”: Hebrew “;9, L”, Greek “pmeOla”, Latin “spiritus”. In Poe’s “The Assignation” (1834), the ingenious stranger’s (Byron’s) elegiac poem on his irrecoverably lost love and irreparably shattered hope subverts the Book of Genesis, where the life-giving Spirit of God hovering over the waters is replaced by the speaker’s hovering, yet despairing and death-giving spirit, “Mute – motionless – aghast!”.1345 Myths and poems connected with death are densely woven into the text: Hyacinthus, Niobe, Orpheus, and Henry King. The atmosphere in Venice is stagnant, breathless, and lifeless, in unison with the city’s sinking into the sea and the lovesick stranger’s choice of death – conventions resumed in Thomas Mann’s novella “Der Tod in Venedig” (1912). It is a claustrophobic atmosphere of death that characterizes many of Poe’s tales, symbolizing both man’s isolation and god-forsakenness, most notably in “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839). Eucharistic wine becomes suicidal poison, and the stranger’s laughing choice of death resumes both the Promethean Byronic hero’s defiance of divine tyranny and anticipates Baudelaire’s connection of eros, intoxication, and death in “La 1343 Swinburne, Poems and Ballads II, A Forsaken Garden, 1878, line 1, in: Complete Works, III. 18. 1344 Ibid. lines 73–80 (final stanza), ed. cit. III. 20. Note the neopagan perversion of I Corinthians 15, 55. “Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” 1345 Poe, The Assignation, II. 162 (stanza 2).

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Mort” (1857). What fills us with new hope is not the promise of resurrection and a natural paradise, but the certainty of death in an artificial paradise: C’est la Mort qui console, h8las! et qui fait vivre; C’est le but de la vie, et c’est le seul espoir Qui, comme un 8xilir, nous monte et nous enivre, Et nous donne le cœur de marcher jusqu’au soir.1346

In Romantic Disillusionism, Christian and Positive Romantic belief in resurrection and regeneration is merely wishful thinking, or is at least heavily shaken by that suspicion. Death is the destination and ultimate end of the journey of life, neither the antithesis nor the gate to a new life “incorruptible and undefiled, and that fadeth not away”. This atmosphere of doubt is impressively visualized in Henry Fuseli’s Gothic painting Achilles Searching for the Shade of Patroclus (1803). In a bleak landscape weakly illuminated by a cold moon, a despairing and self-torturing Achilles vainly tries to catch his friend-lover, whose ghost remains out of reach and isolated. Here, again, the Gothic proves to be subversive, revealing its kinship with Romantic Disillusionism. Although she was taken with the poetological programme of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (1798) and wrote her own Lyrical Tales (1800) on Wordsworth’s model, Mary Robinson contradicted his Platonic optimism regarding prophetic children who denied the ultimate reality of death, together with the relevance of temporary absence. Her poem “All Alone”, the first of her collection, was a Pyrrhonian counterpiece to Wordsworth’s “We Are Seven”. It replaced Wordsworth’s little girl that plays by her siblings’ graves with a little boy that acutely feels the loss of all that were dear to him. Whereas the speaker of Wordsworth’s poem does not succeed in making the little girl aware of her deprivation and loneliness after the death of two and the absence of four siblings, the speaker of Robinson’s poem cannot console the despairing little boy with the pious assurance that, in a metaphysical perspective, he is not alone. The quite unprophetic little boy remains disconsolate, and the poem ends on a note of disillusionment: […] I have seen Thy tiny footsteps print the dew. And while the morning sky serene Spread o’er the hill a yellow hue, I heard thy sad and plaintive moan, Beside the cold sepulchral stone.1347

1346 Baudelaire, Les fleurs du mal, La mort, La mort des pauvres, lines 1–4, 119. 1347 Robinson, Lyrical Tales, All Alone, 1800, lines 115–120, in: Selected Poems, ed. cit. 186.

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The later part of the nineteenth century saw the radicalization of the expression of Mary Robinson’s anti-Platonic doubts by turning attempted consolations of death’s temporality into irreligious joy at death’s finality. Honest hopelessness, as taught by the hollow preacher in Thomson’s City of Dreadful Night (1874), comes as a message of salvation, at least from the false promises of established religions. The Wordsworthian succession of “hope” and “despondency” provides the torments of Tantalus unless redeemed from an absurd circle and followed by “despondency corrected” in a completed dialectic. Byron’s Manfred, mourning over the fateful death of his beloved Astarte, is teased and tortured by the Seventh Spirit into an illusion of Astarte’s resurrection, and “falls senseless” as a result of his disillusion in his vain attempt at clasping the vanishing phantom: Oh God! if it be thus, and thou Art not a madness and a mockery, I yet might be most happy. – I will clasp thee, And we again will be – My heart is crushed!1348

The torture is resumed in the fourth scene of the second act, when Arimanes allows Nemesis to again “uncharnel” Astarte at Manfred’s request. Her phantom, however, will neither forgive nor condemn him, nor promise another meeting in a world beyond, and she disappears with the sole consolation that his “earthly ills” will soon be relieved by death – a typical instance of Byron’s sceptical 1pow^. A Spirit comments Manfred’s disillusionment with his wishful fantasy of a pacifying resurrection: He is convulsed – This is to be a mortal And seek the things beyond mortality.1349

There are striking parallels between Edgar Allan Poe’s poems “The Raven” (1845), “Annabel Lee” (1849), and “Ulalume” (1847) on the one hand, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poem “The Portrait” (1870) and his four “Willowwood” sonnets (1870) on the other. These were written after the death of his wife Elizabeth Siddal Rossetti in 1862, over which he felt guilty, though before the actual rescue of other poems from her coffin. The two narrators of these five poems have lost their beloveds and are tantalized into false hopes of resurrection – Byronic ignes fatui – that serve only to perpetuate and increase their pain and loneliness. Painting the lost love’s portrait does not provide real consolation in pointing to her survival in a world beyond; instead, it preserves her memory in a temporary rather than eternal work of art (“a moment’s monument”) and tor1348 Byron, Manfred, I/1, 188–191. 1349 Ibid. II/4, 158–159.

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tures the painter and speaker into a deepening awareness of the irretrievable loss: “And yet the earth is over her”.1350 Rossetti’s Amor, stirring the brackish waters in an almost dry well to create the illusion of a resurrected love, acts contrary to Amor’s traditional function of reuniting man and the world, “amor vincit omnia”. In the “willowwood” he is the champion and perpetuator of despairing “widowhood”,1351 Vereinzelung. As such, he is a nightmarish incubus and sadist rather than a saviour.1352 In “The Blessed Damozel”, both the poem (MS 1847) and the altarpiece painting (1871–1879), the highly eroticized, deceased woman in heaven and her equally eroticized lover on earth torture themselves with doubtful biblical promises of resurrection and reunion, all the more as their prevalent sexual desires remain unfulfilled in a perversion of Dante’s Vita nuova. After ten years of an immeasurably painful separation, they still feel and miss each other and heaven’s consolation will not come. And the raven in Poe’s poem, the alleged inspiration for Rossetti’s poem, has turned from a traditional messenger of Heaven – the bird of the Gods – to a tormenting agent of Hell, raising false expectations of a resurrected Lenore while simultaneously repeating the truth of his “nevermore”. Both Poe’s and Rossetti’s speakers suffer the mythical pains of Tantalus, symptoms of the dispensation of a sadistic God or the indifference of a distant One: ‘Wretch,’ I cried, ‘thy God hath lent thee – by these angels he hath sent thee Respite – respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore; Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!’ Quoth the Raven ‘Nevermore.’1353

In January 1847 when he lost his wife Virginia to sickness – shortly after their marriage and in circumstances comparable to D.G. Rossetti’s later loss of his wife Elizabeth – Poe wrote “Annabel Lee”, where he repeated the reproach of heaven’s sadism aggravated by heaven’s own deadly sin of envy. Heaven sunk Annabel Lee back into the sea from which all creation comes and into which all creation returns with absolute finality. It is only in the tortured memory of the surviving husband and lover that the deceased returns constantly, torturing him until his own death. Poe then fell into the expected (and possibly arranged) melancholy depression described in “Ulalume”. The poem’s speaker cannot escape the vicious circle of illusion and disillusion, suppression and remembrance. He has temporarily banished all memory of his loss, but the suppression provides no rest. His unquiet, volcanic soul drives him restlessly through a 1350 D.G. Rossetti, Poems, The Portrait, 1870, line 9, in Collected Poetry and Prose, 70. 1351 D.G. Rossetti, The House of Life, Willowwood III, 1870, line 3, in: Collected Poetry and Prose, 150. Note the paronomasia. 1352 Ibid. Willowwood I, lines 9–14, ed. cit. 149. 1353 Poe, The Raven, I. 368.

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monstrous landscape that mirrors the diseased state of his soul, and the monsters are his ostracized grief and pain which must come back and haunt him. In that dark, bleak, volcanic landscape of the soul dominated by associations of death,1354 the Byronic would-be romantic and must-be realist seeks to be a positive romantic prophet-poet searching for symbols that point to a world beyond, and the first streaks of lunar and stellar light are ecstatically interpreted as symbols of eternal light, just as the sky is made a symbol of heaven. Paradoxically, the disillusion is conveyed by the speaker’s psyche, literally imagined as a winged creature with its dialectic of caterpillar (life), chrysalis (death), and butterfly (resurrection to a new, higher life). Again, as with amor and the raven, the traditional iconology is inverted when the speaker’s psyche droops its wings and calls the romantic dreamer’s wishful thinking back to cold reality, revealing the lights of the moon and stars as pernicious, tormenting, Byronic ignes fatui: But Psyche, uplifting her finger, Said – ‘Sadly this star I mistrust – Her pallor I strangely mistrust – Ah, hasten! –ah, let us not linger! Ah, fly! – let us fly! – for we must.’ In terror she spoke, letting sink her Wings till they trailed in the dust – In agony sobbed: letting sink her Plumes till they trailed in the dust – Till they sorrowfully trailed in the dust.1355

The speaker wants to have the “legended” tombstone read, expecting a consolatory “hic expectat resurrectionem mortuorum”. But, again, it is the speaker’s psyche and not his analytical reason that destroys the pious illusion by reading the bleak name “Ulalume”, renewing his experience of grief by breaking up the suppressed memory of his love’s burial. There is a striking anticipation of this inversion of hope into torture in Karoline von Günderrode’s poems, “Das Band der Liebe” and “Das Fest des Maien”. The Platonic tie, or vinculum, uniting the here and the hereafter, becomes a chain arresting the mourner in the vain hope of the resurrection of his or her deceased love. Just as later in Rossetti’s sonnets, wishful thinking produces the phantasm of the dead upon the surface of water only to destroy the blissful illusion in heightened despair :

1354 “Ulalume” rhymes on “tomb”, “Weir” associates “weird”; “Auber” anticipates Swinburne’s lake of death or Lake of Aube in southern France; Astarte as femme fatale recalls the deadly nature and false promises of the moon, and, above all, it recalls the literary characteristics of the ballad with its tragic nature and sinister world view. 1355 Poe, Ulalume: A Ballad, lines 51–60, ed. cit. I. 417.

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Ihm ist, er säh in dem Gekräusel Der Wellen ein geliebtes Bild Und aus des Baches tiefem Grunde Winkt ihm ein liebes Aug so mild. Er hebt die Arme es zu fassen Die Fluten treiben es dahin Und spielen wechselnd mit dem Bilde Bis seine Züge sich verziehn.1356

Günderrode’s imagery of the life-sucking vampire preceded Rossetti’s imagery of the torturing incubus Amor : Teil ich mein Leben doch mit unterirdischen Schatten, Meiner Jugend Kraft schlürfen sie gierig mir aus.1357

The convention of eighteenth-century Preromantic graveyard poetry (Edward Young, Robert Blair, and James Hervey), with its consolatory meditations among nocturnal tombs, is perverted here into its polar opposite: recurrent, intensified despair. The circle of the year, as well as the doubting nature of the last stanzas, suggest that the speakers – representatives of modern man, with his split nature – will never find rest in this life because their romantic dreaming and selfdeceit will inevitably pull them towards illusion, and his experience of bleak reality will always destroy that illusion, operating in repeated circles without any aim and necessitating an increase of pain. There can no longer be a lasting, comforting belief in a resurrection of what is dead and what has found its final lethe or oblivion. Romanticism’s self-inspection and preoccupation with the individual soul, which gave birth to psychoanalysis and psychiatry, necessarily produced such surrealist dream-poems as “Ulalume”, especially when written under the influence of drugs. It also produced such decadent-symbolist novels as Georges Rodenbach’s Bruges la morte (1892), with a hero, Viane, who mourns the death of his wife and seeks consolation and the illusion of resurrection in a double, Jane, who tortures him to such an extent that he strangles her with a relic of his dead wife: her hair. Instead of regeneration, death simply renews death, just as the sea that has withdrawn from the now dead city of Bruges will never return to refill it with life. The sweet bells of the city are false, torturing promises of the resurrection of a dead wife and a dead city. One reason why modern man in particular must irretrievably lose his faith and love is his thirst for knowledge, an awareness which increasingly gained ground in the nineteenth century. Longing to be an eagle and doomed to be a bat, 1356 Günderrode, Nachlass, Das Fest des Maien, MS ca 1805, 41–44, in: Sämtliche Werke und ausgewählte Studien, I. 395. 1357 Günderrode, Gedichte und Phantasien, Die Bande der Liebe, 1804, 23–24, ibid. I. 68.

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as well as knowing that the little he can know will only make him all the more unhappy, his nature still forces him to be a quester for ultimate truth. Byron’s Manfred and Cain, as we have seen, were early literary manifestations of this problem. Analysis destroys the enjoyment of both their lives and their loves. Similarly, Meredith’s married couple analyse their love instead of living it and thus accelerate its death. Their self-destructive quest is, again, associated with the ocean. Those who risk exploring it will find themselves rudderless in chaos and exposed to death by shipwreck and drowning.1358 Neither can there be any resurrection of human love once it has been lost. This is another interpretation of Byron’s assertion that war follows love, just as vinegar follows wine in marriage1359, and of his dictum “Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure”.1360 The central idea – later expressed in the dramas of Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg – that marriage is Hell Regained instead of Paradise Regained, as all life within and without man is, in truth, irreparable infernal chaos, derives from Byronic Romantic Disillusionism. Belief in Plato’s and the Positive Romantics’ dialectic by trying to overcome the fragmentation of this fallen world (as expressed in the separation of the sexes) in love and marriage appears as self-deceptive and self-destructive. Again, man in pursuit of a paradise finds only hell. Disillusion follows illusion, and the illusion of regeneration makes the truth even more painful to bear. In Meredith’s Pre-Raphaelite sonnet sequence Modern Love (1862), which prefigured and anticipated D.G. Rossetti’s sonnet sequence The House of Life (1870) in its inversion of Dante and Petrarch, the torture of the married partners does not simply consist in a progressive disillusionment leading to a more intense loneliness, replacing love with hatred, but in a repeated revival of vain expectations. Her efforts towards reviving his love fails by the shore of the all-creating and all-devouring sea, “la mer fatale”, and the wife’s final revenge consists in secretly taking poison and giving her husband the final illusion of a reconciliatory kiss: He found her by the ocean’s moaning verge, Nor any wicked change in her discerned; And she believed his old love had returned, Which was her exultation and her scourge. […] About the middle of the night her call Was heard, and he came wondering to the bed.

1358 Meredith, Modern Love, Sonnet L, lines 13–16, in: Poems, I. 145. The idea of destructive truth and the need to cling to illusions, lies, or masks in order to survive reappears in Henrik Ibsen’s as well as Eugene O’Neill’s plays. 1359 Byron, Don Juan, 3. 5. 5–8. 1360 Ibid. 13. 6. 8.

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‘Now kiss me, dear! it may be, now!’ she said. Lethe had passed those lips, and he knew all.1361

Romantic Disillusionism’s doubting of the individual resurrection of mortal man and his mortal love found a parallel in doubting the individual resurrection of mortal empires and civilizations. In both cases illusions of resurrection seek to provide consolation but only double the pain. In Manfred, the voice of an evil power in the court of the tyrant Arimanes proudly declares how it saved the French Empire only to destroy it again. It helped Napoleon to escape from Elba only to dump him on St Helena: The Captive Usurper Hurl’d down from the throne, Lay buried in topor, Forgotten and lone; I broke through his slumbers, I shivered his chain, I leagued him with numbers – He’s Tyrant again! With the blood of a million he’ll answer my care, With a nation’s destruction – his flight and despair.1362

In Don Juan, as we have seen, Byron propagated a succession of different historical civilizations that memory records and forgets. In larger historical dimensions of space and time, Georges Cuvier’s study of fossils confirmed the suspicion that geological change led to extinction, with crusts heaped upon crusts of dead or dying civilizations, so that all literary works share the same sad fate of all creatures, worlds, and civilizations: mortality and survival as dead fossils: But let it go: – it will one day be found With other relics of ‘a former world,’ When this world shall be former, underground, Thrown topsy-turvy, twisted, crisped, and curled, Baked, fried, or burnt, turned inside-out, or drowned, Like all the worlds before, which have been hurled First out of and then back again to Chaos, The Superstratum which will overlay us. So Cuvier says; – and then shall come again Unto the new Creation, rising out From our old crash […]1363 1361 Meredith, Modern Love, Sonnet XLIX, lines 1–16, in: Poems, I. 144. 1362 Byron, Manfred, II/3, 16–25. 1363 Byron, Don Juan, 9. 37. 1–8 and 9. 38. 1–3.

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James Thomson’s dark Schopenhauerian preacher, with his burning eyes and enormous head denoting modern Kopflastigkeit, confirms the thoughts of Byron’s speaker, though in a more tragically pessimistic tone: ‘We finish thus; and all our wretched race Shall finish with its cycle, and give place To other beings, with their own time-doom: Infinite æons ere our kind began; Infinite æons after the last man Has joined the mammoth in earth’s tomb and womb.’1364

But, leaving out such larger dimensions, our civilization itself is subject to phases of destruction or decay that leave no hope for dialectical regeneration. Venice and Rome are cities repeatedly mentioned by Byron as they epitomize the ultimate death of the world, and thus give teleological views of history the lie. In Byron’s Venice: An Ode (1818), the speaker, a “northern wanderer”, sees the once proud city sink into the waters of ultimate death, the non-regenerative and nonmillennial vision of a Negative Romantic which leads to meditations on historical and cultural hopelesness. Man’s history moves in absurd cycles, not in dialectical spirals: There is no hope for nations! – Search the page Of many thousand years – the daily scene, The flow and ebb of each recurring age, The everlasting to be which hath been Hath taught us naught or little: still we lean On things that rot beneath our weight, and wear Our strength away in wrestling with the air; For ’tis our nature strikes us down […]1365

Byron’s generation had witnessed the end of the once mighty Venetian Republic in 1797 when Napoleon, then a General of the French Revolution, claimed to have liberated the Venetians from oppression by the Doges and the Councils of the Ten. French historiography of Venice presented the Venetian Republic as a prison of secrecy, corruption, and torture, a view which Byron adopted in his two Venetian plays: Marino Faliero and TheTwo Foscari (both 1821).1366 However, Byron refused to accept these histories’ implied celebration of Napoleon as liberator. After the abdication of the last Doge in 1797, there followed French tyranny, replaced by Austrian tyranny in 1815. In the fourth and final canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron the speaker 1364 Thomson B.V., The City of Dreadful Night (1874), XIV. 54–60, ed. cit. I. 155. 1365 Byron, Venice: An Ode, 2. 1–63. Again an aspect of the disintegrative world-split: man’s voluntaristic nature will not allow him to give up vain hope. 1366 Five Romantic Plays, 1768–1821, Introduction, ed. cit. XXVIII.

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drops the mask of the childe, his alter ego as a pilgrim of life on the ocean of death. There, the disillusioned pilgrim has built himself a little, vain raft of hope from the wrecks of foundered ships to sail on to he knows not where. In the context of this imagery he narrates his sentimental experience of Venice, with numerous digressions into history and philosophy. The ocean of death, from which all life rises and to which all life returns – spitting out the wrecks of final destruction – also gave birth to Venice, the city in historical and physical decay which now “Sinks, like a seaweed, into whence she rose”.1367 The formerly glorious “sea Cybele”1368 has lost her power and fertility. The annual ceremony symbolizing the fruitful marriage of Venice and the ocean has fallen into desuetude: The spouseless Adriatic mours her lord; And, annual marriage now no more renewed, The Bucentaur lies rotting unrestored, Neglected garment of her widowhood!1369

The vicinity of her palace to her prison, connected by a “bridge of sighs”, symbolizes the proximity of glory and misery, rise and fall, freedom and misery. In her glorious “thirteen hundred years of freedom”, she had been Europe’s bulwark against Turkish tyranny, yet had herself enslaved other nations. Now, in 1818, after her dissolution and enslavement by Napoleon, she is enslaved by Austria: “An Emperor tramples where an Emperor knelt”.1370 The conquering lion (“piantaleone”) and the wild steeds before St Mark’s stand “but in mockery of […] withered power”.1371 Byron’s thoughts wander from Venice to his beloved native Britain, another island risen from the sea and destined to be swallowed up again. King George, Liverpool, Castlereagh – the rulers of the Restoration – are reminded of the uncertain foothold of their publicly deployed glory and splendid isolationism; their subjects, Byron’s readers, are admonished to trust neither their rulers’ promises of future greatness nor their illusion of sea-protected safety. The liberal Byron’s exile from Britain, like the exile of liberal Venetians from Venice, is viewed as a sure symptom of decay : […] thy lot Is shameful to the nations, – most of all, Albion! to thee: the Ocean queen should not

1367 1368 1369 1370 1371

Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 4. 13. 6. Ibid. 4. 2. 1. Cybele was the magna mater, the Phrygian goddess of fertility. Ibid. 4. 11. 1–4. Ibid. 4. 12–14. Ibid. 4. 11. 6.

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Abandon Ocean’s children; in the fall Of Venice think of thine, despite thy watery wall.1372

Byron was too much of a Romantic imbibed with the cult of ruins not to feel the beauty of decay, a stance often repeated in Venetian scenes of Decadent and Finde-SiHcle literature from Swinburne to Thomas Mann. Art and civilization will be finally overgrown and swallowed up by nature.1373 This is why the Venetian stanzas conclude with long descriptions of a beautiful sunset.1374 The literary Venetians, Shakespeare’s Shylock and Othello, Otway’s Pierre, and Byron’s own Foscari, will survive the ruin, but, as usual in the style of Romantic Disillusionism, only for a time. But they, too, are illusions, even more so than tangible reality.1375 Oblivion will finally and inevitably swallow all. The Venetian stanzas have a purposefully visionary, fata morgana quality, suggesting that all life, real or literary, is merely a dream, a mirage, and an illusion, arriving like truths and disappearing like dreams.1376 Byron’s portraits of Venice and Rome have many things in common. Both are melancholy capitals of former empires shown in states of ruinous decay. Both correspond to the mood of the melancholy, disappointed visitor in the decline of his life, “a ruin amidst ruins”. Both are in states of double slavery – that of foreign rulers (Austria and France) and of the Roman Catholic Church. Both are barren mothers: Rome is called “The Niobe of Nations […] Childless and crownless”, withered, and covered by a sprawl of empty graves of long-forgotten heroes.1377 But the Roman stanzas start on a different assumption as they deconstruct the myth of the “eternal city”, like the Phoenix a symbol of ever-repeated regeneration and rejuvenation to higher levels of strength and beauty. In this dialectical sense, Percy Shelley inserted his Rome stanzas into Adonais (1821), his Platonic, pastoral elegy on the death of John Keats, celebrating his resurrection into the eternal world of ideas and reintegration into the World Spirit.1378 To visit Rome was to drink new health and life, both from its Roman and Christian sources.1379 By contrast, Byron’s Rome has seen numerous phases of building and destruction, one following the other in absurd circles. Mary Shelley must have had Byron’s image of Rome in mind when, in Valperga (1823), she made Castruccio’s beloved Euthanasia the last scion of her dying family and had 1372 Ibid. 4. 17. 5–9. 1373 Ibid. 4. 3. 6. The thought became common in Decadent and Fin-de-SiHcle literature and art – witness Joseph Conrad and Robert Delaunay. 1374 Ibid.4. 27–9. 1375 Ibid. 4. 4–7. 1376 Ibid. 4. 7. 2. 1377 Ibid. 4. 78. 1–9. 1378 P.B. Shelley’s stanzas 48–49. 1379 A famous instance is Goethe’s Römische Elegien (MS 1788–90).

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her visit a decadently monkish and moribund Rome, the mere ruin of past grandeur, where her brother dies in spite of “every hope of his recovery”.1380 Decadent Rome forms the backdrop to the last of the race, doomed to fall just like her castle Valperga, negating all dialectical regeneration.1381 Rome and death are associated, just as Venice also is with death – la citt/ e la morte – both mHres fatales. James Thomson B.V. and Ferdinand Freiligrath were among those who referred to Byron’s “Niobe of Nations” and Byron’s scepticism in their own poems. Thomson’s reference in his favourite modern-heroic rhyme-royal stanza that alludes to the short-lived triumph of the Italian Risorgimento in 1860 confirms Byron’s cultural pessimism. Repeated illusory hope is necessarily followed by repeated disillusion: The Niobe of nations, petrified, With all her children prostrate at her feet, Each with barbed arrow in its side, Hath started into sudden life to greet With yearning love and wonder rapture-sweet Her darlings waking from their trance of death; Though two lie still, ev’n they breathe prescient breath.1382

Byron’s poetic drama The Deformed Transformed insistently mentions the myth of Rome’s foundation by Romulus and Remus, followed by Romulus’s fratricide of Remus, and shows only one chapter of its later, circular history : splendidly rebuilt Renaissance Rome destroyed and sacked by the mercenaries of Emperor Charles V in 1527. On the whole, it is a process of wearing out after initial youth, strength, and glory. Rome’s unavoidable decay is again imputed to the paradoxical, antithetically-mixed nature of things and man to whom “the field of freedom” is simultaneously the field of “faction, fame, and blood”.1383 A Poesque “impulse of the perverse” makes man actively work out his own destruction instead of salvation, contrary to biblical teaching.1384 According to an ancient proverb, the Coliseum, Rome, and the world still stand, but, in fact, they stand as ruins in a state of progressive decay, like hollow trees and hollow men still braving the storms of life without hope of regeneration: Rome and her Ruin past Redemption’s skill, The World, the same wide den – of thieves, or what ye will.1385

1380 1381 1382 1383 1384 1385

M. Shelley, Valperga, 1823, ed. cit. 112. Also see her later novel The Last Man (1826) and Stafford, The Last of the Race, 216–31. Thomson B.V., The Dead Year, MS 1861, 35. 1–7, in: Poetical Works, II. 271. Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 4. 113. 1. Philippians 2, 12: “[…] work out your own salvation with fear and trembling”. Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 4. 145. 7–8.

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The successive rebuilding of Rome is not regeneration. It produces a ruinous chaos of veneers, newly built edifices, and removed spoils,1386 and, as in Venice, they convey the impression of a dream or fata morgana: But Rome is as the desart, where we steer Stumbling o’er recollections; now we clap Our hands, and cry ‘Eureka!’ it is clear – When but some false mirage of ruin rises near.1387

As in the Venetian stanzas, Byron accords great art – authors such as Cicero and buildings such as the Pantheon and St Peter’s – a longer survival, though that, too, will be limited by history. In the Venice stanzas he also reminds his own native Britain of its unavoidable decline. Caesar casts his shadow over both Cromwell and Napoleon, all three builders of empires destined to fall. Cromwell united Britain into an empire by annexing Scotland and Ireland, but, symbolically, the anniversary of his two greatest victories was also the day of his death, the 3rd of September : […] but beneath His fate the moral lurks of destiny ; His day of double victory and death Beheld him win two realms, and, happier, yield his breath.1388

Byron’s Venice and Rome may well have inspired Heine’s poem “Im Morgenglanze ruht das Meer”, with its subversion of the poetical myths of the resurrection of drowned cities from the sea, irrespective of the false promises of their many churches and ringing bells: Das Läuten und das Beten, wißt, Wird nicht den Städten frommen, Denn was einmal begraben ist, Das kann nicht wiederkommen.1389

Venice in particular remained the favoured city illustrating the feeling of slow decay without promise of regeneration, and death without resurrection, from Romantic Disillusionism to the Decadence and Fin de SiHcle. Platen’s Venetian sonnets of 1824 create an atmosphere of ultimate farewell, a final, irrecoverable enjoyment of beauty in the setting sun, so much so that it also inspired Thomas Mann’s “Der Tod in Venedig” (1912). The speaker’s Schwermut, in view of black

1386 1387 1388 1389

Ibid. 4. 143. 1–5. Ibid. 4. 81. 6–9. Ibid. 4. 85. 6–9. Heine, Vermischte Gedichte [aus dem Nachlaß], Im Morgenglanze, lines 9–12, in: Sämtliche Schriften, IV. 473.

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gondolas and rotting palaces, makes him half enjoy the feeling of a reality fading into dreams and nothingness: Eh’ mir ins Nichts die letzten Stunden rinnen, Will noch einmal ich auf und nieder wallen, Venedigs Meer, Venedigs Marmorhallen Beschaun mit sehnsuchtsvoll erstaunten Sinnen.1390

This view of Venice may also have inspired Wilhelm Müller’s poem “Vineta”, whose elegiac speaker dreams of a once beautiful city engulfed by the sea which, instead of facing resurrection, acts as an ignis fatuus and draws men into its watery death: Aus des Meeres tiefem, tiefem Grunde Klingen Abendglocken dumpf und matt, Uns zu geben wunderbare Kunde Von der schönen alten Wunderstadt. In der Fluthen Schooß hinabgesunken, Blieben unten ihre Trümmer stehn. Ihre Zinnen lassen goldne Funken Wiederscheinend auf dem Spiegel sehn. Und der Schiffer, der den Zauberschimmer Einmal sah im hellen Abendroth, Nach derselben Stelle schifft er immer, Ob auch rings umher die Klippe droht.1391

On his travels in France and Italy in the years of the 1848 and 1849 revolutions, the Radical and sceptic Arthur Hugh Clough, Matthew Arnold’s ever-restless and deracinated friend, had similar experiences in decaying Naples. Easter in Naples should strengthen hopes of resurrection both for men and cities, but, of the two Tennysonian voices, that of doubt drowns out that of belief. Once a believing Christian (-Clough had been fascinated by Newman and the Oxford Movement-), the speaker’s inference is similar to that in the works of Byron and Büchner, though without the Romantic Disillusionists’ consolatory hedonism making up for their loss of religious faith: Eat, drink, and die, for we are men deceived, Of all the creatures under heaven’s wide cope We are most hopeless who had once most hope,

1390 Platen, Sonette: Venedig, 35, lines 5–8, in: Sämtliche Werke, ed. cit. III. 188. 1391 Müller, Lyrische Reisen und epigrammatische Spaziergänge, Muscheln von der Insel Rügen, Vineta, 1827, lines 1–12, in: Gedichte, 280.

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We are most wretched that had most believed, Christ is not risen.1392

In the eyes of a Pyrrhonist, resurrection to another life would be a catastrophe, a disturbance of final peace in the grand n8ant. In the elegiac stanzas on the death of the young Princess Charlotte Augusta in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron consoled his mourning readers with the high probability of an incomplete dialectic – a non-resurrection, final end, and ultimate rest in the grave or fading away in destruction’s mass deep in the impenetrably dark abyss: […] but never more, Oh, happier thought! can we be made the same: It is enough in sooth that once we bore These fardels of the heart – the heart whose sweat was gore.1393

In Emily Bront[’s anti-Platonic dialogue poem “The Philosopher” (1845), a Platonic “seer”, inspired by Plato’s cave parable, calls upon a sceptical “philosopher” to quit his dark study and face the illuminating, truth-revealing light of the sun. The philosopher, however, would rather remain in his chamber than obey Plato’s injunction, there anticipating his all-relieving death without the threat (rather than promise) of resurrection. It is only in death that the weak will of man need engage no longer in a vain fight against his passions, which are unconquerable despite threats of hellfire: ‘O for the time when I shall sleep Without identity – And never care how rain may steep Or snow may cover me! No promised Heaven, these wild Desires, Could all or half fulfill – No threatened Hell – with quenchless fires, Subdue this quenchless will!’1394

Emily’s brother Branwell struck the same chord in his poems, with their favoured themes of suffering life and relieving death, as well as man’s self-deception in religious faith. His Byronic poem “Real Rest” (MS 1845), for instance, echoes the imagery of the all-devouring ocean in Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–1818) and anticipates Baudelaire’s “Une Charogne” (1857) in its description of and reflections on an ugly, rotting corpse that floats on the water. All Platonic and Christian associations of crossing the river destined for the other 1392 Clough, Easter Day, Naples 1849, MS 1849, lines 72–76, in: Poems, ed. F.L. Mulhauser, Oxford English Texts, Oxford 1974, 201. 1393 Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 4. 166. 6–9. 1394 E. Bront[, The Philosopher, MS 3 February 1845, lines 7–14, in: Poems, ed. cit. 165.

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shore, the saving ship upon the water, the joys of paradise, the immortality of the soul, and the resurrection of the dead are spared or perverted. Salvation is not the safe shore of the immortal world beyond but the mere total extinction of the Schopenhauerian suffering of life: No sudden agonies dart through thy breast; Thou hast what all men covet, REAL REST. […] I’d give my youth – my health – my life to come, And share thy slumbers in thy ocean tomb.1395

All death is a final relief from the absurdity and decay of life, whereas dreams and religions provide merely temporary, dangerous relief. The end of Venice, Rome, and Naples prefigures the end of the world, just as in Lucretius’s De rerum natura the plague in Athens prefigures universal annihilation. In his sombre, Lucretian poem “Darkness” MS 1816), Byron imagined this terrible end with the consoling idea that salvation by nothingness is still better than the old theology of the immortal soul’s punitive afterlife.1396 In other pre-Decadent poems on the final salvation of man by death, this contentment with mortality by far outweighs the terrors of death. This is the case in Waiblinger’s moving poem on the Cimitero Acattolico in Rome, where he wanted to find final peace and actually was buried in 1830. Rusticated from the theological Tübinger Stift for his agnosticism, shocked by his friend Friedrich Hölderlin’s madness, exiled in Italy, and lost in ruinous excesses that he knew would lead to his premature death, Waiblinger sought final peace and freedom from the arbitrariness of blind fate in the total oblivion of the grave. His poem is hence a Negative Romantic idyll: Ein Plätzchen ach! so teuer, Wie mich noch keins entzückt, Wo Lieb’ und liebend Feuer Mein Herz einst nicht mehr drückt, Wo’s ruht in aller Stille, Dem Sturme nicht mehr bloß, Entbunden aller Hülle, Ja frei und schicksallos.1397

Happy are those who do not believe in a resurrection of the dead and a new life, because death is better. Elysium is to be found here, in a cemetery, and not in either a future terrestrial millennium or world beyond: 1395 B. Bront[, Real Rest, 8 November 1845, lines 37–38, 45–46, in: Poems, ed. cit. 275. 1396 Priestman, Romantic Atheism, Cambridge 1999, 239. 1397 Waiblinger, Der Kirchhof, MS 1826–1827, lines 25–32, in: Werke und Briefe, 5 vols., ed. Hans Königer, Stuttgart 1980–1985, I. 180.

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O welch ein Glück, hienieden, Kein Gläubiger zu sein!1398

As, later, in Swinburne’s neopagan poems on the subject of death in the scandalous first series of his Poems and Ballads (1866), such as “Ilicet” and “Anima Anceps”, there is no escape from mortality. All religious promises are declared to be either lies or suspicious doctrines subject to scepticism. No conversion to any religion can relieve man of his final, happy expectation of salvation in nothingness. The neopagan creed of “hic non expectat resurrectionem mortuorum” is better than the Christian creed, and, as opposed to the Bible, the grave rejoices at not delivering its dead, mocking all religious constructions: Sleep, is it sleep perchance that covers Each face, as each face were his lover’s? Farewell; as men that sleep fare well. The grave’s mouth laughs unto derision Desire and dread and dream and vision, Delight of heaven and sorrow of hell.1399

Ave Atque Vale (MS 1868), Swinburne’s later epicedium on the death of Baudelaire, resumes both the title and doctrine of “Ilicet”: let us go and take our final leave of life’s tortures. The yearning for the emptiness of le grand n8ant is better than the troubles of another life beyond the grave, be it rebirth into this world or return into one beyond. Possibly inspired by the inroad of Buddhism in nineteenth-century thought, emptiness and nothingness have come to replace biblical paradisiacal bliss: Content thee, howsoe’er, whose days are done; There lies not any troublous thing before, Nor sight nor sound to war against thee more, For whom all winds are quiet as the sun, All waters as the shore.1400

From 1848 to 1865, Baudelaire had translated and commented on the tales of Poe, whose Romantic Disillusionism had influenced him heavily. Furthermore, it was through Baudelaire’s mediation that Poe was received in the Decadence and Fin de SiHcle. In Poe’s tale “Ligeia”, as we have seen, the dying titular heroine 1398 Lines 63–64, ibid. I. 181. 1399 Swinburne, Poems and Ballads, Ilicet, 1866, lines 31–36, in: Complete Works, I. 208. 1400 Swinburne, Ave Atque Vale, 1878, lines 194–198, ed. cit. III. 51. Also cf. Danton’s despair of life in Büchner’s tragedy Dantons Tod, act III, in: Sämtliche Werke, 62: “Ja – wer an Vernichtung glauben könnte! dem wäre geholfen. – Da ist keine Hoffnung im Tod; er ist nur eine einfachere, das Leben eine verwickeltere, organisiertere Fäulnis, das ist der ganze Unterschied!”

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composes her prophetic poem “The Conqueror Worm”.1401 Man here appears as the tragic hero of the mere puppet-show of life, moved around in an absurd circle and ultimately slain by unconquerable Death. God takes no interest in his creation, not even as an onlooker, and the guardian angels of religion are reduced to mere compassionate spectators. Death, the end of life’s tragedy, is both the final curtain and final relief: Out – out are the lights – out all! And over each quivering form, The curtain, a funeral pall, Comes down with the rush of a storm, And the angels, all pallid and wan, Uprising, unveiling, affirm That the play is the tragedy, ‘Man,’ And its hero the Conqueror Worm.1402

Poe’s visions of that final grand n8ant were haunting rather than consolatory, both in his tales such as “A Descent into the Maelström” (1841) and in his poems such as “Dream-Land” (1844). The “ultima Thule”, the land beyond the limits of the world visited by the poem’s speaker, is a place of horror, “Out of SPACE – out of TIME”.1403 Here, ghosts are merely ghouls, melancholy is merely depression, and sublimity is merely the unfathomable depths of hell lacking the unfathomable heights of heaven. To the living dream- and opium-traveller who has returned from that land, there is thus no relief from anguish nor any rays of hope except the expectation that, after death, men there may find their paradise of nothingness: For the heart whose woes are legion ’Tis a peaceful, soothing region – For the spirit that walks in shadow O! it is an Eldorado!1404

With reference to Poe and Baudelaire’s Les paradis artificiels (1860), Swinburne composed his scandalous “Garden of Proserpine” (1866) as a perverted church hymn, giving thanks to “whatever gods may be” for opiatic forgetfulness in life and final forgetfulness in death as man’s ultimate redemption: From too much love of living, From hope and fear set free, We thank with brief thanksgiving 1401 Previously published in Poe, The Raven and Other Poems (1845). 1402 Poe, The Conqueror Worm, lines 33–40, in: Ligeia, 1838, final version 1845, in: Collected Works, II. 319. 1403 Poe, Dream-Land, line 8, ed. cit. I. 344. 1404 Ibid. lines 39–42, ed. cit. I. 345.

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Whatever gods may be That no life lives for ever; That dead men rise up never; That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea.1405

This is why Karoline von Günderrode draws the conclusion from her Indian sage’s disillusioning insight into the horror vacui of the world’s eternal circular returns: Nicht Ew’ges kann der Mensch ertragen, Und wohl ihm, wenn er auch vergeht.1406

This is also why the speaker of Byron’s lyric “Euthanasia” sees the “good death” of the title as a lonely one without regret, unattended by weeping friends or praying priests. Such a death forgoes the need for lies of hypocritical lovers or metaphysical superstructures because it is the final salvation itself. Created out of nothingness without his own will or connivance – the complaint of Byron’s Cain – man is finally allowed to return to nothingness, a disillusioned inversion of the dialectical Platonic yearning for and return to eternal life in a reintegrated world beyond. It was this poem that Schopenhauer quoted in the context of the need to overcome nature’s blind Will to live on, with a general reference to the representation of woeful human life in the poetical works of Leopardi: ‘Ay, but to die, and go’, alas! Where all have gone, and all must go! To be the nothing that I was Ere born to life and living woe! Count o’er the joys thine hours have seen, Count o’er thy days from anguish free, And know, whatever thou hast been, ’Tis something better not to be.1407

At the end of Byron’s Heaven and Earth, noble Japhet mourns that he is doomed to survive the deluge in his father Noah’s ark. Knowing that new life after the flood will be just as disconsolate and painful as before, unable to discern purpose or justice in the stern decree of “the implacable Omnipotent” that the proud and 1405 Swinburne, Poems and Ballads, The Garden of Proserpine, lines 81–88, in: Complete Works, I. 301. The Garden of Proserpine perverts the Garden of Eden in its praise of death. 1406 Günderrode, Gedichte und Phantasien, Der Adept, 1804, lines 51–52, in: Sämtliche Werke und ausgewählte Studien, I. 51. 1407 Byron, Euthanasia, 1811, lines 29–36, in: Complete Poetical Works, I. 354. Last stanza quoted in Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, ed. cit. II. 781. Byron’s reference is to Shakespeare, Hamlet, III/1, 60–87.

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the meek, and the guilty and the innocent must die in an unprecedented mass destruction – and that neither prayer nor curse will prevail – his concluding speech is typically Byronic in overcoming the Will to live on, anticipating Schopenhauer’s and Hardy’s “coming universal wish not to live”:1408 To die! In youth to die! And happier in that doom, Than to behold the universal tomb, Which I Am thus condemn’d to weep above in vain. Why, when all perish, why must I remain?1409

Musset’s Rolla, drifting towards his suicide, is repeatedly lured from his purpose by visions of sunrise, music, and dreams of a better world. However, disillusionment pricks all such bubbles with the conviction that in an aimless world of repeated absurd circles there is no sense in prolonging one’s days: Dites-moi, terre et cieux, qu’est-ce que donc que l’aurore? Qu’importe un jour de plus / ce vieil univers?1410

Büchner’s heroes – Leonce, Danton, and Woyzeck – are plagued by the wish to die, either through suicide or by delivering themselves up to the world’s perverted justice.1411 Their melancholy is not the creative kind sought by the speaker of Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy” (MS 1819), a sine qua non of Romantic genius in theories of genius, but “Lethe” and “Wolfs-bane” and “nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine”.1412 It is thus a merely destructive disorder breeding nothing but renewed disorder, confusion, and death, corresponding to the author’s own, selfconfessed, melancholy in writing dramas whose hallmark of truth is deformity, denying the Platonic or Keatsian ideal of “das Wahre, Schöne, Gute.” Danton gives frank expression to his melancholy world-weariness as the reason for his refusal to escape Robespierre, St Just, and the People’s Tibunals: “[…] das Leben ist nicht die Arbeit wert, die man sich macht, es zu erhalten”.1413 What makes him cling to this life is the sceptical suspicion that a possible life beyond might be even more chaotic, commenting on Hamlet’s “dread of something after 1408 Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 1895, part VI, chapter 2, in: Novels and Tales, Library Edition, London 1952–1962, XVI. 406. 1409 Byron, Heaven and Earth, 3. 924–929. 1410 Musset, Rolla, 5. 40–41, in: Po8sies, 288. 1411 See the end of Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), again with reference to the injustice of the world’s law courts and the sadism of the world’s Creator: “‘Justice’ was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess.” 1412 Keats, Ode on Melancholy, lines 1–10, in: Poems, 539. 1413 Büchner, Dantons Tod, II, in: Sämtliche Werke, 34. Note the ironically telling name of St Just.

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death”.1414 Nothingness, the later Fin de SiHcle’s grand n8ant, would thus be an act of divine salvation from chaos, devoutly to be wished: “Die Welt ist das Chaos. Das Nichts ist der zu gebärende Weltgott”.1415 Valerio also saves the melancholic and disaffected Leonce from suicide not because he believes in any higher value of life or any regeneration to despondency corrected but because he loves life’s only realities: sex, food, and drink.1416 Unlike Leonce, he finds limited happiness in life as he never dreams of ideals, so never relapses into the reality that causes suicidal melancholy. Valerio thus sees ennui and aimlessness as a chance for extensive physical gratification. He mocks death and the biblical doctrine of the resurrection in a similar way to Byron in his “Lines Inscribed upon a Cup Formed from a Skull” (MS 1808). Byron’s poem is even more disrespectful than the gravediggers’ dialogue in Hamlet over Yorick’s skull. It omits all references to the world beyond, reducing spirituality to wine and resurrection to a chance finding and recycling of a skull for use in a tavern, ergo bibamus instead of memento mori: Quaff while thou canst – another race, When thou and thine like me are sped, May rescue thee from earth’s embrace, And rhyme and revel with the dead.1417

Similarly in Grabbe’s Scherz, Satire, Ironie und tiefere Bedeutung, drunkenness is the only state in which man can bear this chaotic world. If, as the devil contends, the world’s deus, or creator, was a bungler, then the poet – as alter deus – must be one too. The comedy’s hallmark is its disorderly ugliness and vulgarity, showing the world as a comic hell, underpinning das Gute und Schöne as well as its ideal Platonic origin, das Wahre. In the end, Grabbe, the alter deus, appears as a cynical Diogenes, heading for drink with no command over his fictitious characters who debate whether to admit their creator to his own theatre.1418 The radical dissociation of das Gute, Schöne, Wahre and the rejection of all literary stylization and beautification as being deceptive masquerade – consequently making deformity and realism the hallmark of all true art – was a widespread commonplace in Romantic Disillusionism, as in Büchner and Grabbe. True, beauty of form could be used to contrast and contain the ugliness of reality, deconstructing Platonic kalokagathia, as in Baudelaire. However, 1414 1415 1416 1417

Shakespeare, Hamlet, III/1, 78. Büchner, Dantons Tod, IV, ed. cit. 74. See his final carnal utopia in Büchner, Leonce und Lena, III/3, ed. cit. 143. Byron, Fugitive Pieces, Lines Inscribed upon a Cup Formed from a Skull, MS Newstead Abbey 1808, lines 17–20. 1418 Grabbe, Scherz, Satire, Ironie und tiefere Bedeutung, III/6, ed. cit. I. 295.

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where there existed no ideal world beyond there was also neither remedy nor theodicy for this real world’s ugliness, and no need for the artist to point out non-existent eternal beauties in lasting works of beauty. In Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, Lionel Verney roams through a modern, ugly, plague-ridden, dying London, and finds himself in Drury Lane Theatre witnessing a performance of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. He experiences Shakespeare as a “wizard” taking his audience “out of this world” and permitting the imagination to revel, “without fear of contradiction, or reproof from reason or the heart”.1419 Londoners have thus “come hither to forget awhile the protracted scenes of wretchedness”, willingly deluded by Shakespeare’s supernatural machinery and unrealistic, beautified art. This was also the purpose of the production: “[…] the first actor of the age was there to exert his powers to drug with irreflection the auditors”.1420 What saved the play and production, fitting with Mary Shelley’s Romantic Disillusionism, was the character of the suffering Thane of Ross and his speech on suffering Scotland as being the epitome of a suffering world. Unlike the “first actor of the age”, with his studied art, the man who played this part was an “inferior actor”, whom truth made excellent. He shouted out his real anguish and destroyed the magic illusion, calling the drugged audience and the drugged first-person narrator back to bleak reality : A pang of tameless grief wrenched every heart, a burst of despair was echoed from every lip. – I had entered into the universal feeling – I had been absorbed by the terrors of Rosse – I re-echoed the cry of Macduff, and then rushed out as from an hell of torture […]1421

In general, it was Romantic Disillusionism’s concept of art to be committed to the ugly truth: to uncover the delusion of life, to make it, and man, emerge as an amalgamation of changing masks in a bad play, hiding nothingness and a skull. Beddoes’s Death’s Jest-Book (subtitled The Fool’s Tragedy) provides a rich example: a modern tragicomedy violating all rules of decorum by disjunctly mixing tears and laughter, verse and prose, lyrics and invectives, coarse humour and romantic sensibility, illusion and disillusion, and realism and grotesqueness. This formally mad, carnivalesque mixture of forms and norms, which shocked generations of critics, is the artistic expression of a negative view of a madhouse world in which even the fool or court jester has lost his function, his “cap mediatized”.1422 This is one aspect of The Fool’s Tragedy.1423 The other is that 1419 1420 1421 1422

M. Shelley, The Last Man, ed. cit. 281–282. Ibid. 281. Ibid. 283. Beddoes, Death’s Jest-Book, ed. cit. I/1,10, early version of 1829, in: Plays and Poems, ed. cit. 203. Significantly, the play was rewritten and extended until Beddoes’s death by suicide in 1849.

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death alone provides sense and order to a senseless life, so that the court fool regains his traditional wisdom at the moment of his death; this explains the dying words of Isbrand, the abdicated court fool: “Now Death doth make indeed a fool of me”.1424 It is only in the world of the dead that Isbrand has a function: Death’s new court fool. The early nineteenth-century Jacobean Revival shifted Platonic Romanticism’s interest in youth and health to Romantic Disillusionism’s fascination with degeneration and death, preparing the later Decadence and Fin de SiHcle, and interpreted Jacobean revenge tragedies, John Webster’s in particular, in terms of its own concept of life and art. Chaos, madness and loss of identity are no longer temporary carnivalistic disturbances awaiting a restoration of natural order, but the real, irreparable constitution of the theatre of the world. “All the world’s a stage” for a macabre Punch and Judy show where men and women are puppeteered by their own whims and desires.1425 They are actors in various, ever-changing roles and masks, pre-modern dramatic characters whose layers can be peeled back like onions without ever coming to a true core because there is neither true core nor consistent motivation. Melveric, the everchanging Proteus in an amoral universe, thus wonders at his own changes and failure of memory : […] my soul, dazzled, Stares on the unknown feelings that now crowd it, Knows none of them, remembers none, counts none, More than a new-born child in its first hour.1426

Duke Melveric is alternately a usurper, a faithful friend, a rapist, a murderer, and a pilgrim. The brothers Wolfram and Isbrand, disguised as a knight and a jester, join his court of Münsterberg in Silesia to avenge the murder of their father, the former duke, and the rape of their sister. Instead of taking revenge, however, Wolfram becomes Melveric’s closest ally and blood brother, freeing him from Egyptian captivity in the crusades. There, in Melveric’s company, he again finds his desired Sibylla, whom he believes to be his Platonic counterpart but whose feelings waver between fidelity and disinterest. Melveric’s feelings change from gratitude and friendship to jealousy when he also desires Sibylla, and he murders his rival and rescuer Wolfram, whose body Isbrand (turned from jester to crusader) buries in the grave of Melveric’s deceased wife, exchanging the 1423 Homunculus Mandrake, the first fool to appear in the play, the ominous, telling name suggesting sterility and non-resurrection, quits his function as a doctor’s jester and adopts a nonsense alchemy that has deserted its original, noble, Paracelsian aims. There is no purposeful medical alchemy for an incurable world. 1424 Ibid. V/4, 278, ed. cit. 330. 1425 Frederick Burwick, Romanticism: Keywords, Chichester 2015, 265. 1426 Beddoes, Death’s Jest-Book, I/2, 165–168, in: Plays and Poems, ed. cit. 214.

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corpses. Isbrand dies in the revolt he raises against the usurper Melveric in Silesia, but the ghost of the murdered Wolfram appears when Melveric, now for a time repentant and pious, prays at his wife’s supposed grave, pleading for her return. Graves and corpses prove to be as exchangeable as roles and masks. Nor do these confusions end with that older generation. As in Byron, sons are doomed to behave like their fathers; the circle of life turns as before. Melveric’s sons Athulf and Adalmar, trying to continue their father’s usurpation of Münsterberg, die in a bloody conflict that reproduces those of the previous generation: Athulf murders his brother Adalmar in competition over Amala, who reproduces Sibylla, then commits suicide. Life’s danse macabre ends in death without hope (or rather in fear) of resurrection, as death is the only salvation from death-in-life – a perverted Christian salvation as Wolfram is a perverted Christian saviour.1427 If death is salvation and relief, it can be mocked and fooled in a jest-book tragedy against all rules of decorum, though for other reasons than medieval Christians believing in the resurrection of the dead loudly derided death in the Easter service liturgy. Inspired by Jean Paul’s “Rede des toten Christus”, Beddoes’s world beyond the grave knows no distinction between heaven and hell, good and evil. His play repeatedly suggests that true love, joy, and merriment can exist only after the soul has been set free from the prison of the flesh with its uncontrollable sexual and material desires, the promise of the danse macabre, and that final death without resurrection is the Heavenly Jerusalem of Romantic Disillusionism. It is Melveric’s – a new Wandering Jew’s – punishment that Wolfram takes him into the grave alive, so that he cannot die and be saved in final destruction. Eternal life in the beyond is perverted from the highest reward to the worst sentence involving eternal darkness and pain, condemned never to be delivered from “the unholy world’s forbidden sunlight”.1428 Meeting her death by suicide in Beddoes’s Bride’s Tragedy (1822), the unfortunate Olivia is glad to escape a world where religions spread “idle legends” about retribution in a hell beyond in order to make believers fear what they should welcome in a world of injustice and inequality : What is there here To shrink from? Though your idle legends tell How cruelly he [death] treats the prostrate world; Yet, unto me this shadowy potentate 1427 D. Tandecki, Die Totentänze des Thomas Lovell Beddoes – Death’s Jest-Book und die Verneinung des Lebens, in: Tanz und Tod in Kunst und Literatur, ed. Franz Link, Berlin 1993, 195. For the backgrounds of the disillusioned Romantic-Radical poets and physicians Beddoes and Büchner see F. Burwick, The Anatomy of Revolution: Beddoes and Büchner, in: Pacific Coast Philology, 6 (1971), 5–12. 1428 Beddoes, Death’s Jest-Book, V/4, 347, in: Plays and Poems, ed. cit. 332.

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Comes soft and soothing as an infant’s sleep, And kisses out my being.1429

In Germany, Gutzkow’s novel Wally, die Zweiflerin (1835) caused a scandal because it featured a modern, intellectual heroine plagued by ennui and religious doubt that, combined with repeated experiences of the fatality of love, drive her to active suicide, too. Gutzkow called Byron “die höchste Potenzierung der modernen Bildung”.1430 Wally is represented as being more pious than the surviving shallow believers in a religion they neither understand nor question. Instead of providing her with consolation, her innate religiosity is the ultimate cause of her death, as religion’s half-revelations and unconvincingly tortuous efforts at theodicy cannot make her accept her sufferings with a perspective beyond the grave. Hence her last words, traditionally assumed to carry prophetic truth, in which she sacrilegiously argues that it is somewhat better not to be: ‘Armselig war mein Leben; wie klein, wie nichtig alle die Beziehungen meiner Jugend! Und das war wohl des Todes wert; denn ich bin nichts, nur Staub, nur Vernichtung. Mein Leben ist unnütz.’1431

As the Decadence gained strength against Victorianism, le grand n8ant, the modern heaven of salvation was a theme constantly radicalized in renewed sacrilegious fantasies. In Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night (1874), the cathedral is the darkest place of all in that dark locus horribilis, perverting both the Old Testament’s imagery of the revival of the desert and the New Testament’s topography of the Heavenly Jerusalem. It is a sepulchre of salvation into which only those who relinquish all hope in the limbo of life are admitted – a perverted reading of the inscription above Dante’s gate of Hell: “lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate”.1432 Total disillusionment, the renunciation of all hope as lingering in Pandora’s Box, is a prerequisite to that salvation. A “shrouded figure” stands at the porch and takes the confessions of disillusioned monarchs, politicians, drugaddicts, revolutionaries, Miltonic poets, comedians, epicures, and preachers – an incoherent community of all sorts of men who “wake from daydreams to this real night”.1433 Together with the speaker, the last of the group is a Byronic

1429 Beddoes, The Bride’s Tragedy, V/3, 35–40, ed. cit. 73. 1430 Günther Blaicher, Vorstellungen des Modernen in der deutschen Byron-Kritik des 19. Jahrhunderts, in: Norbert Bachleitner (ed.), Beiträge zur Rezeption der britischen und irischen Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts im deutschsprachigen Raum, Amsterdam 20000, 162. 1431 Gutzkow, Wally, die Zweiflerin, 1835, ed. cit. 127. 1432 Dante, Divina Commedia, III. 9. 1433 Thomson B.V., The City of Dreadful Night, 1874, XII. 1–52, ed. cit. I. 148–151. Every confession begins with the anaphora “From […]” and ends with the epiphora “I wake from daydreams to this real night.” It is a Leopardian perversion of the Christian Baroque

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revolutionary who has come to the Byronic conclusion that revolutions are mere illusions of liberty and progress in history. Then the “massive door” of the cathedral-sepulchre closes behind that group of oddly mixed isolated individuals, finally levelled and saved in a death without resurrection: ‘From desperate fighting with a little band Against the powerful tyrants of our land, To free our brethren in their own despite: I wake from daydreams to this real night.’1434

concept of “disillusionment”, “disinganno”, or “desengaÇo”, as in Calderjn de la Barca’s La vida es sueÇo (1636) where life is a dark dream and death a translucent reality. 1434 Ibid. XII. 49–52, ed. cit. 193.

VII

Man’s Isolation and Progressive Disappointment

Man’s increasing awareness of both his unknown origin and isolation was a central doctrine of Negative Romantic anthropology, expressed variously in the poetry and prose of Byron, Clare, Heine, Wilhelm Müller, Büchner, Grabbe, Leopardi, and Musset. This was one reason why the story of Kaspar Hauser, the mute Bavarian orphan boy of unknown origin flung into the world in 1828, aroused such European-wide attention and became such a prominent subject of nineteenth-century literature, which teems with orphans – both real and metaphorical. In spite of all medical and criminological efforts, no certainty could be established as to where he had come from and why he was murdered in 1833. Speculation was rife. Verlaine’s lyric monologue, for instance, made him the representative of man in general, a Byronic “orphan of the heart” or “calme orphelin […] sans patrie et sans roi” suffering from his isolation: Suis-je n8 trop tit ou trop tard? Qu’est-ce que je fais en ce monde? < vous tous, ma peine est profonde: Priez pour le pauvre Gaspard!1435

Another case that fascinated the Romantic Age was Victor of Aveyron, the feral and mute ten-year-old French boy captured in the Pyrenees around 1800, bleeding and covered with scars. As in the later case of Kaspar Hauser, this child of nature shattered Positive Romanticism’s belief in nature’s benevolence. Mary Robinson’s poem “The Savage of Aveyron” (MS 1800, 1804), written in sickness three months before her death, features a lonely boy exposed to nature’s cruelty. Instead of a benevolent Wordsworthian nature that would never betray those who entrust themselves to its care and always engages to comfort the lost, assuaging feelings of desertion, nature in Robinson’s poem does not integrate or protect man. The boy, whose mother had been murdered when he was a baby 1435 Verlaine, Sagesse, Gaspar Hauser chante, 1881, lines 13–16, in: Œuvres po8tiques complHtes, 279.

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– nature indifferently looking on – groans with pain, and the lonely speaker, instead of accepting the offer of human company and providing help for a fellow creature, feels confirmed in an awareness of men as isolated, tortured individuals: No mortal ear had heard his groan, For him no beam of Hope had shone; While sad he sigh’d – ‘alone, alone!’ Beneath the blasted tree. And then, O! woods of AVEYRON, O! wilds of dreary solitude, Amid your thorny alleys rude I thought myself a traveller – alone.1436

Similarly, the titular orphan boy in Kleist’s short tale “Der Findling” (1811), though not a feral child, is unhappy in his isolation from man and God (represented by a corrupt Roman Catholic Church), and the moral degradation that emerges from this negative experience gives the lie to the Romantic-Platonic persuasion of man’s natural goodness. Nicolo, the boy, ruins Antonio Piachi, his emotionally isolated adoptive father, and the adoptive father finally murders the boy so that he will be executed and can pursue his revenge in hell. Instead of being “father of the Man”, as in William Wordsworth’s Gnostic-Platonic Intimations Ode and his poem “My Heart Leaps Up”, the child experiences the contrary of the dialectic of Paradise Regained, Paradise forever Lost. Where the presence of a caring deity was no longer felt, or indeed flatly denied, man’s isolation from his creator was mirrored in his isolation from himself. This estrangement had been formulated since the “loss of the centre” in the Copernican revolution, as in John Donne’s elegiac First Anniversary (1611). Later, in the more radical philosophy of Negative Romanticism, the same inscrutability and ignorance that dominated man’s relation to his creator also dominated man’s relation to man. The speakers of Byron’s and Clare’s love poems are ultimately lonely, homeless, deracinated, and disillusioned men. In the case of Clare, who experienced an additional physical isolation after being confined in a lunatic asylum in 1837, man’s loneliness in the universe was an estrangement even from his beloved woman – his last resort as, later, in Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1845). Clare’s “An Invite to Eternity” is a seduction poem that inverts the traditional carpe diem seduction poem of the type of Asclepiades, Catullus, Christopher Marlowe, and Andrew Marvell. All that the speaker can offer his “sweet maid” is the common lot of death-in-life, leading a life in a dark cave of shadows, without seeing each other, lacking any Words1436 Robinson, The Wild Wreath, The Savage of Aveyron, 1804, lines 56–63, in Selected Poems, 334.

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worthian hope in nature’s participation in man’s fate, and without any Platonic expectation of the sun restoring truth and unity : Say maiden wilt thou go with me In this strange death of life to be To live in death & be the same Without this life, or home, or name At once to be, & not to be That was, & is not – yet to see Things pass like shadows – & the sky Above, below, around us lie The land of shadows wilt thou trace & look – nor know each other’s face […]1437

There is an intriguing parallel with a poem Elizabeth Siddal inscribed on the back of a letter to Emma Brown, wife of Ford Madox Brown, entitled “AYear and a Day” (MS 1855). As the title indicates, it is about death-in-life and non-resurrection after death. Dying of consumption, fashioned and self-fashioned as Rossetti’s wife and modern Beata Beatrix in whose coffin he was to bury his poems, Elizabeth Siddal cast herself as a speaker, lying corpse-like in the grass in the month of May. Her “first dear love” is no more and nature’s resurrection does not include her or him. The tall grass bends above her head and covers her wasted face as she lies, “empty of all love”, in a kind of Buddhist emptiness that soothes her while she falls asleep, hoping never to reawaken. Elizabeth Siddal obviously hearkened back to Sir John Everett Millais’s Pre-Raphaelite painting of the death of Ophelia (1852) for which she had to pose in water: A silence falls upon my heart And hushes all its pain. I stretch my hands in the long grass And fall to sleep again, There to lie empty of all love Like beaten corn of grain.1438

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poem “The Woodspurge” (MS 1856) creates a comparable experience. Its speaker has followed the wind, sought integration in nature’s rhythms, and now sits on the ground in despair, his head between his knees as he stares at the weeds. The four stanzas’ monotonous rhymes – aaaa 1437 Clare, An Invite to Eternity, lines 17–26, MS Northampton Asylum post 1842, 1848, in: Later Poems, ed. cit. I. 349. 1438 Siddal, AYear and a Day, MS 1855, lines 37–42, in: Poems and Drawings, ed. Roger C. Lewis – Mark Samuels Lasner, Wolfville NS 1978, 17. Quoted and commented by Caroline Franklin – Michael J. Franklin, Victorian Gothic Poetry, in: The Victorian Gothic, 74–75.

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bbbb cccc dddd – underscore the deadness of both the scene and the speaker’s heart. Nature is barren and mute, refusing to speak to him to heal his suffering, giving Wordsworth the lie. The only green and specified weed is the poisonous woodspurge with its three cups, but it denies him any symbolic message, leaving him totally unconsoled and alone: From perfect grief there need not be Wisdom or even memory : One thing then learnt remains to me, – The woodspurge has a cup of three.1439

Often these disillusioned, solitary Romantic individuals move in circles, their initial expectations frustrated by isolation, desertion, or death, as also expressed in the first two lines of Wilhelm Müller’s unfortunate wanderer in Die Winterreise. The speaker’s hope of overcoming loneliness and isolation in a relationship with a beloved woman has evaporated: Fremd bin ich eingezogen, Fremd zieh’ ich wieder aus.1440

The initial idyllic expectations of love and marriage, discredited from the start by their petit bourgeois triteness, have ended in a lack of communication that does not even allow the speaker to take his leave – either personally or verbally. He abandons the house alone in the middle of a frosty night, too proud to wait for his expulsion from the false paradise. As in Byron’s farewell poem to his divorced wife Annabella Milbanke, his valedictory words are not spoken mildly and addressed personally, to explain and assuage, but are ironic, designed to stick and hurt: Will dich im Traum nicht stören, Wär’ Schad’ um deine Ruh’, Sollst meinen Tritt nicht hören – Sacht, sacht die Thüre zu. Ich schreibe nur im Gehen An’s Thor noch gute Nacht, Damit du mögest sehen, Ich hab’ an dich gedacht.1441

In the very first scene of Büchner’s tragedy Dantons Tod (1835), Danton’s dialogue with his wife Julie denotes loneliness through mutual lack of understanding and raises this to the level of universal anthropological truth. Danton, the disillusioned discoverer of the world’s senselessness, puts it drastically : 1439 Rossetti, Poems, The Woodspurge, 1870, lines 13–16, in: Collected Poetry and Prose, 177. 1440 Müller, Die Winterreise, I. Die gute Nacht, 1824, lines 1–2, in: Gedichte, 111. 1441 Ibid. lines 25–32, ed. cit. 112.

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“Geh, wir haben grobe Sinne! Einander erkennen? Wir müßten uns die Schädeldecken aufbrechen und die Gedanken einander aus den Hirnfasern zerren”.1442 Life is a game – denoted by setting the scene at a card table – in which people meet merely by chance, and not by providential arrangement or a Platonic sense of shared metaphysical belonging. In Büchner’s comedy Leonce und Lena (MS 1836), the same view is advanced with an excursion into the absurd, reflecting the absurdity of the world. According to the genre ethic of comedy, the initially reluctant protagonists are finally joined in marriage. However, this occurs not as a result of the ancien r8gime’s traditionally arranged marriage of rank and riches (which fails), nor due to benevolent divine providence (which does not exist), nor due to romantic love (which is not felt), nor due to any teleological purpose, but instead by a mad concatenation of random accidents and mistakes. Neither is there any real interaction. The satirized fragmentation of Germany into petty principalities symbolizes the fragmentation of the world as a whole. Scenes are short and clipped, jumping from plot to plot with bewildering speed; characters are perceived fragmentarily, as noses or garters; and dialogues are marred by frequent misunderstandings. The first dialogue between Leonce and Valerio is a typical instance of non-communication, in spite of their common view of the world’s absurdity. Absurdity precludes communication. As usual in Büchner, characters are puppets and marionettes moved on strings rather than free and responsible human beings: in Danton’s words, “Puppen sind wir, von unbekannten Gewalten am Draht gezogen; nichts, nichts sind wir selbst!”1443 We are reminded of Klingemann’s Nachtwachen, where Kreuzgang, himself a former poet and puppeteer, represents the world as an uninterrupted carnivalesque farce written by a lousy director of a cheap theatre, who shaped his marionettes and their inescapable roles out of sheer boredom rather than wise planning. The noble, Christian-Baroque image of the great theatre of the world, “theatrum mundi” or “das große Welttheater”, that the Classical Tradition had transmitted from Plato’s dialogue Nomoi, is superseded by the ignoble, anti-Platonic, and pre-absurd concept of the great farce of the world, “der großen Weltkomödie”.1444 The distinction between men and automatons is denied in the absurd marriage scene where Leonce and Lena appear as automatons to be wedded by proxy, and where Valerio acts as philosophical masque presenter : Nichts als Kunst und Mechanismus, nichts als Pappendeckel und Uhrfedern! […] Diese Personen sind so vollkommen gearbeitet, daß man sie von andern Menschen gar nicht

1442 Büchner, Dantons Tod, I/1, in: Sämtliche Werke, 9. 1443 Ibid. II, ed. cit. 42. 1444 Klingemann, Nachtwachen, ed. cit. 38.

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unterscheiden könnte, wenn man nicht wüßte, daß sie bloße Pappdeckel sind; man könnte sie eigentlich zu Mitgliedern der menschlichen Gesellschaft machen.1445

Valerio himself appears wearing mask upon mask, so each that is shed only reveals another : “Bin ich das? oder das? oder das? Wahrhaftig, ich bekomme Angst, ich könnte mich so ganz auseinanderschälen und – blättern”.1446 He is thus an ancestor of the characters of the later Theatre of the Absurd, who can be peeled like onions without ever revealing a true core of identity. The protagonists’ masquerade fails to outwit Büchner’s deterministic universe. “Vorsehung” and “Zufall” coincide to form an inescapable trap into which they must fall. The effect of their experience is disillusion, expressed in their common exclamation: “Ich bin betrogen!”1447 For both Klingemann and Büchner, the vulgar onion has come to replace the noble blue flower ; husks peeling down to final nothingness are substituted for a symbol pointing up to eternal substance.1448 Büchner’s Leonce und Lena parodies almost all the articles of the creed of Positive Romanticism: the imaginative and creative character of the world, the divine origin of man, the ring of human sympathy, the world-integrating power of love, the importance of genius, the self-awarding effect of human thought and action, the theodicy of human suffering, the melioristic aim of history, etc. There is a direct, radicalizing line of descent to the representation of encounters and marriages as a mere tragicomic lottery in the novels of H.G. Wells, such as Love and Mr Lewisham (1900), and the lack of communication in the Theatre of the Absurd, such as Samuel Beckett’s Fin de Partie (1957). There is a similar line to D.G. Rossetti’s sonnet “Nuptial Sleep” (1870), with its stress of the separation rather than union of the lovers, and to James Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night (1874), with its representation of an incoherent society of isolated individuals incapable of communication and moving with the mechanicalness of automatons, the infernal counterpart to a religious community.1449 Büchner’s short novel “Lenz” (1839) elaborates on that tragic aspect of the madhouse world of hell, chance, isolation, and lack of communication, which has brought about both the loss of faith and the loss of mental balance of the Sturm und Drang dramatist Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz.1450 All continuity of time and life is Büchner, Leonce und Lena, III/3, ed. cit. 140. Ibid. 3/3, ed. cit. 139. Ibid. 3/3, 141. H. Fleig, Literarischer Vampirismus, Tübingen 1985, 204–206. Note the perverted representation of the unbelieving church and its broken community in The City of Dreadful Night, sections XIV–XVI, ed. cit. I. 153–160. 1450 This is a fictitious version of an episode from Lenz’s short stay with the pastor and social reformer Johann Friedrich Oberlin in Walderbach, near Strasbourg, in January 1778 – the deeply religious Sturm und Drang poet Christoph Kaufmann’s failed attempt at restoring

1445 1446 1447 1448 1449

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denied, symbolized in the sky’s torn clouds and reflected in the broken syntax and fragmentary character of the narration. Negative Romanticism manifests itself in the systematic deconstruction of the typical sublime landscape of Ann Radcliffe’s novels: mountains torn by wet fogs, trees and twigs depressed by rain, the sky totally obscured by clouds so no coherence is visible and no elevation of the soul possible. To the former theologian Lenz, Parson Oberlin’s happy family circle – a haven of happiness in Positive Romanticism – becomes an oppressive and philistine enclave of mendacious and escapist Biedermeier. All attempts to overcome isolation in religious practice and communicative dialogue fail. Lenz’s prayers fall into the void unheard, and his dialogues with the parson and the villagers provide only temporary relief, which soon proves to be illusory as he invariably relapses into his former state of madness and isolation as the irredeemable conditio humana. Community appears as a construction of Christian believers who cannot bear the world’s painful absurdities, or of Romantic idealists who cannot face the world’s ugly realities.1451 Realism replaces idealism as Lenz’s poetology replaces Kaufmann’s (and Büchner’s poetology replaces Schiller’s). Christoph Kaufmann, the self-appointed and self-fashioned esemplastic Romantic genius called to interpret the world’s Platonic unity, its integral symbolic structure, and the holiness of all existing things to adult men and civilizations lost in materialistic obscurity becomes a target for satire. Another example of such Geniesatire, typical of Romantic Disillusionism, is Grabbe’s poet Rattengift, whose vain search for ideas and symbols ends in ugly, disconnected details and trite visions of isolated men, such as a chewing beggar or a shitting boy.1452 On closer observation, society remains as fragmentary as individual men, frequently perceived as parts of their bodies. In Beddoes’s Death’s Jest-Book, we have another portrait of total social incoherence. The closest ties of blood and sentiment prove illusory in the play’s constellation of characters. Friends and blood brothers (Melveric and Wolfram) become mortal enemies, one murdering the other and being in turn haunted and drawn into the grave by his victim’s ghost; brothers either quarrel beyond hope of reconciliation (Wolfram and Isbrand) or commit fratricide and suicide over a dukedom and a woman (Athulf and Adalmar); and lovers experience an oriental paradise as destructive, and their love as being doomed to die (Wolfram and Sibylla) in the wake of the experience of Byron’s Don Juan and Haid8e. Death alone can reconcile man with man and bring about a joyful social coherence that life never allowed the characters to achieve. Lenz’s mental balance. For further details see Jan-Christoph Hauschild, Georg Büchner : Biographie, Stuttgart 1993. 1451 Lenz’s (and Büchner’s) argument against Kaufmann’s “shameful idealism”; Büchner, Lenz, in: Sämtliche Werke, 89–90. 1452 Grabbe, Scherz, Satire, Ironie und tiefere Bedeutung, 1827, II/2, in: Werke, I. 255–256.

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Büchner and Beddoes – disillusioned Radicals, physicians, and poets diagnosing an incurable world – stood in direct line of succession to Byron. Man’s isolation and society’s fragmentation is a pervasive motif in Byron’s work, from his early lyric poetry to his last, unfinished epic. Byron’s solitude is no longer the Wordsworthian solitary wanderer seeking and finding integration in nature’s larger whole, and Byron’s love and imagination effect the very contrary of Positive Romantic love: they destroy and disintegrate, instead of overcoming splits and reuniting opposites. This is also the experience of the speaker of D.G. Rossetti’s early poem “My Sister’s Sleep” (MS 1846). On Christmas Eve, the speaker and his mother sit lonely, in a bleak room around the body of his dead little sister. He knows that his sister is dead, yet his mother tries to cling to the illusion that her daughter is only sleeping – an illusion maintained by hollow Christmas rituals that are quickly destroyed. Time marches on relentlessly, meaninglessly, and the hour of midnight initiates no rite de passage. Christmas songs are mechanically repeated, insistently by the despairing mother and disbelievingly by the younger son, representing the new generation. There is no indication of community, only silent, isolated despair in a stiflingly narrow room described in fragments. In spite of the room’s warmth, the inhabitants’ hearts are as cold as the frosty scene without, including the icy moon, in a state of deathin-life. Rossetti’s use of Tennyson’s In Memoriam-stanza is ironic, subverting his pious Christmas scenes, together with his regained belief in salvation and resurrection: Without, there was a cold moon up, Of winter radiance sheer and thin; The hollow halo it was in Was like an icy crystal cup.1453

The central idea that the Christian-Platonic-Wordsworthian message of love, communion, community, and communication might be a painful illusion, only causing the twin false hopes of integration and security, is conveyed in recurrent images of delusive will-o’-the-wisps and religions, a fragmented world, and the cold moon. The latter is a cosmic femme fatale in Romantic Disillusionism, alluring man with dreams of warmth and togetherness, only to throw him back into the awareness of his lonely Geworfenheit. The Grandmother’s Tale in Büchner’s Woyzeck sees this sadistic deception as an experience that an orphaned child – no Blakean prophet and seer – makes in very early life. The grandmother (traditionally expected to comfort children with moral tales) disillusions a group of children with the story of that orphan who sought solace and protection in the lights of the sky, beginning with the moon. On closer 1453 D.G. Rossetti, My Sister’s Sleep, lines 17–21, in: Collected Poetry and Prose, 72–73.

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inspection, she explains, the orphan found the moon to be nothing more than a piece of shining, rotten wood, and returned to earth lonelier than before.1454 In his Negative Romantic sonnet sequence Amaryllis (1825), Friedrich Rückert’s speaker, dominated by a Poesque spirit of the perverse, complains of the seductive moon’s false promises. As in Rückert’s own experience of his love affair with an illiterate innkeeper’s daughter, disillusionment has replaced faith in a purposeful and benevolent divine creation of the universe: Wozu, o Mond, mit deinem Strahlenschimmer Hat dich ein Gott in Lüften aufgehangen, Als daß die Lieb’ in deinem Licht sollt wallen? Die Liebe wallt in deinem Lichte nimmer, Der Docht in deiner Lamp’ ist ausgegangen, Und deine Scherben laß vom Himmel fallen.1455

Amaryllis, with its reference to the erotic flower in Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden engraved by Blake, narrates the story of an intellectual’s ridiculously irrational but absurdly irresistible love (‘amor’) for a stupid peasant girl, the very contrary to the bucolic love in Ovid’s Eclogues or the spiritual love in Petrarch’s Canzoniere that serve as subtexts. While idealizing this unrequited love, the speaker’s Romantic Irony simultaneously satirizes it as being driven by mere sexual impulses: futile, illogical, and doomed to fail from the very beginning. The moon is the siren that lures him on in absurd circles. In Lermontov’s ballad 4_bck, the moon is a strange villainess looking on coldly and indifferently through the clouds at a work of destruction – a solitary, unhappy lover’s accidental meeting with the woman whom he had once loved and who, he learns, is now married, leading to his consequent death from grief.1456 And in Verlaine’s famous poem “Clair de lune” (1869), which inspired melancholy music by Claude Debussy, men masquerade and dance under the moonshine, disguising their sadness underneath the self-deception of a successful life and love: “L’amour vainqueur et la vie opportune”.1457 This selfdelusion of lovers, which death alone can end in spite of man’s awareness of his continuing life-lies, is also a subject elaborated on in the final two acts of Eugene O’Neill’s play A Moon for the Misbegotten (MS 1942–1943). The reality of day becomes bearable under the mask of night, and the moon mocks human roleplaying: 1454 Büchner, Woyzeck, in: Sämtliche Werke, 172. 1455 Rückert, Amaryllis: Ein Sommer auf dem Lande, 1825, sonnet 55, lines 9–14, in: Gesammelte poetische Werke, ed. cit. I. 310. 1456 Lermontov, 4_bck, posth. 1889. In: Gedichte, 25–27. 1457 Verlaine, FÞtes galantes, Clair de lune, 1869, line 6, in: Œuvres po8tiques complHtes, 107.

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JOSIE. God forgive me, it’s a fine end to all my scheming, to sit here with the dead hugged to my breast, and the silly mug of the moon grinning down, enjoying the joke.1458

Remembering his unfortunate love for Mary Chaworth and his unfortunate marriage with Annabella Milbanke, Byron wrote “The Dream” (1816), a prototypical story of the unfortunate relationship between a man and a woman who end “both in misery”.1459 Man’s unconscious, the storehouse of his perceptions and experiences, not metaphysical anamnesis, creates dreams, second-order realities in the theatre of the mind, giving shape to archetypal fears as in the Gothic novel and drama.1460 Men and women must love and yearn for perfection in and through love in this world, but no true, metaphysically assigned partner is ever found, so there is no escape from l’amour fatal. Loving relationships always prove to be oblique or out of joint. At best they are tragicomic, like the sick, impotent poet Heine’s affair with his Mouche. In most cases, however, expectations of ideal love are simply the cause of self-torture, disappointment, and death. The poem’s speaker is cast in the form of a prophetic dream allegory, in the false expectation of a Positive Romantic anamnesis and vision of metaphysical truth. However, his initial faith is undermined by doubt; personal memory of earthly misery replaces generic anamnesis of metaphysical glory. The hoped-for ascension from Dante’s Hell to his Paradise does not take place; hell remains the condition of man. Both the man and the woman of the speaker’s vision are deceived by Platonic promises of pertinent halves joined in love and Romantic blue flowers, princesse lointaine or prince lointain. However, the boy is a senex puer inverting the classical topos of puer senex, mentally older than his young age would suggest – Byron’s self-fashioning in contrast to the Positive Romantic fresh child of nature – and as such is a precursor to Thomas Hardy’s Father Time in Jude the Obscure (1895). He falls in love with an older woman, who yearns for another ideal lover. They meet in the oratory of a ruined ancient mansion, but even in this once holy place they are both alone and find communication impossible. He wanders aimlessly in the desert, which appears as a wasteland under an indifferent sky : man on his earth is as lonely as God in his heaven.1461 She marries a man whom she does not love, her Platonic hopes becoming as broken as his. He does the same, thinking back to his lost love during the empty church marriage ceremony. Misery disorders her brain and she has horrible dreams of terrestrial truths, 1458 O’Neill, A Moon for the Misbegotten, act III, in: Complete Plays, Library of America, New York NY 1988, III. 934. 1459 Byron, The Dream, MS July 1816, final line 226. 1460 Peter Otto, Multiplying Worlds: Romanticism, Modernity, and the Emergence of Virtual Reality, Oxford 2011, 81–106, 107–128. 1461 Byron, The Dream, lines 105–125, ed. cit. IV. 26.

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which resemble the speaker’s dream in their incomplete dialectic and ultimate loss of hope and metaphysics:1462 And this the world calls phrenzy ; but the wise Have a far deeper madness, and the glance Of melancholy is a fearful gift; What is it but the telescope of truth? Which strips the distance of its phantasies, And brings life near in utter nakedness, Making the cold reality too real!1463

Byron’s love poems are invariably about illusion and loss, either through separation or by death. Even his “Stanzas to Augusta” (1816), apotheosizing his beloved half-sister as the last steady point of orientation in his erratic life, discredit the poem’s hymnic end by its disillusioned beginning: When all around grew drear and dark, And reason half withheld her ray – And hope but shed a dying spark Which more misled my lonely way.1464

Augusta is too far removed from the speaker to function as a saviour, apart from her comparison with a deciduous tree shedding its “weeping leaves” on the speaker’s monument in the graveyard. Read against the background of Dante’s Vita Nuova and Divina Commedia, there exists neither a sense of a world beyond nor of a remote, yet present, Beata Beatrix capable of leading the speaker heavenward. There is no consolation, hope, or hold in grief, or in any loss of orientation. The speaker of the second poem “To Thyrza”, mourning the premature death of his favourite boy1465 in an ironic play on his reader’s expectations of sexual correctness, appears as a disorientated quester who seeks a new integration, but finds none. “The heart – the heart is lonely still!”1466 The “busy life” of men provides no refuge from loneliness because society is a false herd, where every individual will be a “light unmeaning thing, That smiles with all, 1462 Note the construction of the story from Byron’s own life: his love affairs with Mary Chaworth and Caroline Lamb, his tour through the Ottoman Empire 1810–1811, these women’s later fates, and his own marriage and divorce from which he had just fled to Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. Marchand, Byron: A Portrait, 246, calls the poem “a capsule history of his life from youthful idealism through disillusionment to sad resignation and melancholy despair”. 1463 Byron, The Dream, 1816, lines 177–183, ed. cit. IV. 28. 1464 Byron, To [Augusta], 1816, lines 1–4, ed. cit. III. 386. 1465 For John Edleston, who died at 16 years of age in May 1811, see above, and Marchand, Byron: A Portrait, 107–108. 1466 Byron, To Thyrza, 1811–1812, line 24.

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and weeps with none”.1467 The poet’s lyre, which must only express honest and true feelings, cannot breathe with ease; smiles and pleasurable company mock rather than relieve pain. The heavenly bodies such as the moon, that had previously seemed to provide warmth and orientation, now shine coldly and indifferently ; so does all earthly nature, expressed in the image of the beautiful, short-lived roses that are strewn over and wither on the grave. Nor can the thought of freedom from love’s bondage bring relief. The comparison with the old slave set free suggests the very contrary : the liberated slave, who had found support in bondage, was released into total disintegration and disorientation.1468 Thyrza’s pledge of love (the cornelian heart which Edleston gave to Byron) now proves to be both vain and bitter. Supposedly a token to vanquish separation and time, all-devouring time proves itself stronger. The poem’s final stanza ends on a note of melancholy resignation, adding more bitterness to the preceding stanzas. What might be a concluding consolation is in reality a mere resignation to the inevitable pains of the solitary Tantalus, whose absurd rounds of foreseen expectation and disappointment replace Wordsworth’s integrating rounds of nature and society. Though he knows that the dead are dead and lost forever, the speaker cannot help but remember and therefore torture himself. Absurdly, lost love seems the more hallowed the less hope of recovery there is: Thou bitter pledge! thou mournful token! Though painful, welcome to my breast! Still, still, preserve that love unbroken, Or break the heart to which thou’rt prest! Time tempers love, but not removes, More hallow’d when its hope is fled: Oh! what are thousand living loves To that which cannot quit the dead?1469

Byron’s poem “Remember Him”, addressed to a surviving paramour lost over social conventions, formulates the speaker’s subversive view of love and togetherness even more pointedly, apart from its dig at the destructive forces of society (“this our gaudy world”).1470 He reminds her to remember him, so that both isolated individuals cannot forget what is forever lost. Thus, the final reality and cement of love is torture as, later, in Meredith’s Modern Love. Healthy separation and oblivion appear impossible. The speaker’s torture consists in loneliness aggravated by thoughts of loss, indelible by oblivion. As is frequently the case in Byron, the poem itself is an expression of unavoidably painful 1467 1468 1469 1470

Ibid. line 12. Ibid. lines 37–40. Ibid. lines 49–56. The stanza can be read as an inversion of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116. Byron, Remember Him, 1813, line 26, ed. cit. II. 93.

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memory, an irresistibly inspired act of suffering and the infliction of pain. In “When We Two Parted”, the speaker’s painful parting from his paramour (Lady Frances Webster) is merely the harbinger of greater and more lasting pain – the lack of the healing power of oblivion – kept virulent by a coercive society both ignorant of and indifferent to the truth.1471 In “Fare Thee Well”, the speaker’s adieu to his divorced wife (Annabella Milbanke Byron) is characterized by a chaos of feelings forbidding oblivion, an absurd alternation of disdainful or mild reproaches and disdainful or mild refusals to reproach. Even the common child is a reminder of loneliness rather than a tie uniting the parents, and both hearts will keep bleeding for what they can “never more” recover. The absurd circle of acting against insight and awakening to renewed death-in-life is expressed in Byron’s favourite adverb “still” (in its repetitive as well as its adversative sense): Still thine own [heart] its life retaineth – Still must mine – though bleeding – beat, And the undying thought which paineth Is – that we no more may meet. – These are words of deeper sorrow Than the wail above the dead, Both shall live – but every morrow Wake us from a widowed bed.1472

The “cureless wound” caused by love is kept bleeding because the former lovers must tear and wrench, and cannot let their old love fade. They can suppress vain and idle words, but not vain and idle memories: But the thoughts we cannot bridle Force their way without the will.1473

The dense imagery of desolation and disintegration, especially at the poem’s end, underscores the despair of regeneration and undercuts the poem’s hymnal stanzas: “widowed”, “wither”, “forsaken”, “disunited”, “torn”, “seared”, “lone”, “blighted”. In such an absurd universe of isolated individuals under the tyranny of such a deceptive and destructive function of love, death is a relief from death-in-life, especially to men who paradoxically killed the creature they loved, Manfred the widower of Astarte and Herod the widower of Mariamne. Even as early as in Hebrew Melodies (1815), poems written to fit Jewish music collected and arranged by Isaac Nathan, Byron proved a sceptical reader of the Old Testament, fixing on stories akin to his own life-experience, featuring exile, defeat, vain 1471 Byron, When We Two Parted, 1815, lines 17–24, ed. cit. I. 320. 1472 Byron, Fare Thee Well, 1816, lines 25–32, ed. cit. I. 381. 1473 Ibid. lines 55–56, ed. cit. I. 382.

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hopes, disillusion, destruction, emotional confusion, uncontrollable passions, and the split nature of man and the world: And mine’s the guilt, and mine the hell, This bosom’s desolation dooming; And I have earn’d those tortures well, Which unconsumed are still consuming!1474

In Beddoes’s Death’s Jest-Book, as in Klingemann’s Nachtwachen, man’s isolation and incapacity to communicate is based on a disintegrating, sceptical anthropology of a universal Weltriss and Gespaltenheit. Beddoes’s cynical philosopher – his wisely abdicated court jester Isbrand – explains the lack of communication throughout of the play when, in a non-communicative dialogue with a lady of his court, he characterizes man as a constitutionally bisected creature: As I live I grow ashamed of the duality of my legs, for they and the apparel, forked or furbelowed, upon them constitute humanity ; the brain no longer; and I wish I were an honest fellow of four shins when I look into the note-book of your absurdities. I will abdicate.1475

Split within himself, from his fellow men, and from surrounding nature on, above, and below his native earth, man remains an aimless wanderer whose solitude is a curse rather than – as in Positive Romanticism – a blessing. Wilhelm Müller’s self-exiled winter traveller realizes that loves are forever misunderstood, fleeting, changing, and brief encounters, ending somewhere in a lonely but merciful – in that it ends pain – death. On his leaving his temporary house and love, to entrust himself to chance on a new, aimless Wanderschaft, he bitterly and ironically comments on God’s miscreation of man and the world: Die Liebe liebt das Wandern, – Gott hat sie so gemacht – Von Einem zu dem Andern – Fein Liebchen, Gute Nacht!1476

Franz Schubert’s sombre setting to music of Müller’s Winterreise (1826), composed when he himself was terminally ill and dying from syphilis, itself an 1474 Byron, Hebrew Melodies, Herod’s Lament for Mariamne, 1815, lines 21–24, ed. cit. III. 307. For Byron’s lyrical Bekenntnisdichtung in his rendering of the Old Testament see Judith Chernaik, The Wild-Dove Hath Her Nest, in: Times Literary Supplement, 5265 (2004), 12– 14. 1475 Beddoes, Death’s Jest-Book, II/3, 91–96, in: Plays and Poems, ed. cit. 241. As later in Sigmund Freud, humanity is here reduced to mere outward varnish. During his student years in Göttingen 1825–1829, Beddoes attended lectures on physiology and chemistry, hoping to find some proof of survival after death. 1476 Müller, Die Winterreise, Gute Nacht, 1824, lines 21–24, in: Gedichte, 111.

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unwelcome symptom of fleeting loves, reproduces the poet’s sombre verses according to the Romantic ordering of the arts: ut musica poesis. In a similar twinning of the sister arts, Byron’s Hebrew Melodies (1815) subverted the Hebraeo-Jewish concept of mutual love and human community in a subtle mixture of love songs with those of unrewarded prayer and hatred. They transcend the denial of individual love and communication by the denial of national as well as divine love and communication. “Were My Bosom as False”, for instance, is a bitter reproach addressed by a Jewish speaker to a Christian, turning Christian anti-Judaism into Jewish anti-Christianism. The speaker and his addressee view each other not as human beings but as accursed infidels whom God has excluded from his grace. Prejudices are inverted, not overcome. At the time of the Jewish emancipation, both in England and Prussia, the intellectuals like Byron and Isaac Nathan, Byron’s publisher John Murray, and Murray’s friend Isaac D’Israeli (father of Benjamin Disraeli) could cooperate, but popular prejudices would survive and prevent wider integration and communication. The Jewish speaker’s words are thus meant to disrupt all dialogue: I have lost for that faith more than thou canst bestow, As the God who permits thee to prosper doth know ; In his hand is my heart and my hope – and in thine The land and the life which for him I resign.1477

The bitter fate of the Jews, cast out from their Holy Land and doomed to wander destitute, typifies the condition of the Liberals after the victory of the reactionary forces in the year of the Congress of Vienna, but also, more generally, the expulsion of man from paradise. Thus, a number of poems in Hebrew Melodies deal with Jewish suffering, exile, and the diaspora, including “The Wild Gazelle”. A Jewish speaker laments his people’s lot, to whom God had promised shadow and water in the desert, the strength of palm trees and the firmness of cedar trees, hearts satiated with divine love and rejoicing in salvation like gazelles jumping with vigorous glee. The Holy Land and the Jewish diaspora are described in Old Testament imagery, so as to denote the myth Paradise and the historical reality of Paradise Lost: But we must wander witheringly, In other lands to die; And where our fathers’ ashes be, Our own may never lie:

1477 Byron, Hebrew Melodies, Were My Bosom As False As Thou Deem’st It To Be, lines 9–12, ed. cit. III. 305. Note the implicit vituperation of God’s broken promise and injustice in making unbelievers prosper.

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Our temple hath not left a stone, And Mockery sits on Salem’s throne.1478

“On Jordan’s Banks”, Byron’s version of Psalm 13, changes the psalmist’s assurance of promised divine help into the modern exile’s scepticism. God fails to keep his promises in spite of man’s fervent prayers, the tyrants and the powers of evil have prevailed again and again, and hope of salvation has been increasingly infected by doubt. Erotema and question marks replace thanksgiving and praise. Man’s isolation from his fellow man is matched by his isolation from God: Oh! in the lightning let thy glance appear ; Sweep from his shiver’d hand the oppressor’s spear! How long by tyrants shall thy land be trod? How long thy temple worshipless, Oh God?1479

The literary representation of man’s constitutive isolation from man and nature in the Jewish poet Heine, including his denigration of community and society, owes as much to Byron as Beddoes and Müller, and is hardly less radical. Heine’s lyrics seem more hilarious because of the poet’s d8doublement de la personnalit8; his ability to laugh from without at what he suffers from within. But his repeated romantic fatalism, “Mein Lieb, wir sollen beide elend sein!”, echoes Byron’s, where beloved women end up in misery or madness, as well as Byron’s repeated paradoxical adverb “still” (in the adversative sense of “yet”): man will love in spite of his insight into love’s destructive power.1480 In Heine’s “Lyrisches Intermezzo”, man is isolated from both nature and his fellow creatures, most conspicuously in his estrangement from his love. Constructions of the male speakers and their beloved women vary from poem to poem. She either deserts him for another love equally unpromising and short-lived, or she annoys him with her insipidity and possessive nature, or both drift apart in their awareness of universal desertion. The speakers of those anticlimactic poems usually begin with high expectations of Romantic-Platonic fellowship and reunion, mirrored in the poems’ affirmative Romantic Volksliedstrophe, before proceeding to exaggerations or banalizations preparing the poems’ disillusioning final lines or stanzas. Later, in the final poems written to Mouche (Elise Krinitz) in 1856 in his Matratzengruft in Paris, the earlier forms of isolation are inverted. Now the spirits of the lovers are one, but the bodies can no longer find fulfilment because of the dying poet’s impotence. And even that union of the spirits stands on the 1478 Ibid., The Wild Gazelle, lines 19–24, ed. cit. III. 292. 1479 Ibid., On Jordan’s Banks, lines 9–12, ed. cit. III. 293. 1480 Heine, Buch der Lieder, Lyrisches Intermezzo, XIX, 1822–1823, 1827, in: Sämtliche Schriften, I. 82. Also see the commentary in: Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke, ed. Manfred Windfuhr, Hamburg 1975–1997, I. II. 798.

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basis of madness instead of health, corresponding to a mad, aimless world of unrelieved suffering.1481 A favourite Romantic image that Heine deconstructs in this context is that of the horse-drawn stagecoach with its postillion. This stood for natural and organic movement, akin to rivers and streams leading man homeward, an idyllic Kontrafaktur to the unnatural speed and ugliness of railroads.1482 Heine’s stagecoach-rides, however, end in blank disappointment. Dreamy anticipations of reunion, love, and home are abruptly dispersed. One traveller is awakened by the mocking faces of three shadowy figures recalling the three Fates: Mein Wagen rollet langsam Durch lustiges Waldesgrün, Durch blumige Täler, die zaubrisch Im Sonnenglanze blühn. Ich sitze und sinne und träume, Und denk an die Liebste mein; Da grüßen drei Schattengestalten Kopfnickend zum Wagen herein. Sie hüpfen und schneiden Gesichter, So spöttisch und doch so scheu, Und quirlen wie Nebel zusammen, Und kichern und huschen vorbei.1483

Another speaker likens all human life to a hectic and relentless stagecoach ride which, instead of taking us home to our loves, takes us somewhere past all love, man or woman, whoever the chance love is. Encounters are brief, chaotic, and purely accidental: Eine große Landstraß ist unsere Erd, Wir Menschen sind Passagiere; Man rennet und jaget, zu Fuß und zu Pferd, Wie Läufer oder Kuriere. Man fährt sich vorüber, man nicket, man grüßt, Mit dem Taschentuch aus der Karosse; Man hätte sich gerne geherzt und geküßt, Doch jagen von hinnen die Rosse.

1481 Heine, Nachgelesene Gedichte 1845–1856, III. Abteilung: Lamentationen, 30 Lotosblume, lines 1–12 and 31, lines 1–8, in: Sämtliche Schriften, VI. I. 342–343. 1482 For a later example see the beginning of George Eliot’s novel Felix Holt the Radical (1866). 1483 Heine, Buch der Lieder, Lyrisches Intermezzo, LIV, 1822–1823, 1827, ed. cit. I. 97.

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Kaum trafen wir uns auf derselben Station, Herzliebster Prinz Alexander, Da bläst schon zur Abfahrt der Postillon, Und bläst uns schon auseinander.1484

In “Willkommen und Abschied” (1770), Goethe’s rider, like Eichendorff ’s wanderers, has an anticipatory vision of his love and home, saturating him with feelings of completion (both physical and metaphysical). In the Petrarchan sonnet tradition even temporary adversity and separation cannot shake his love and belief. Heine, in his parody on Goethe’s poem, has his speaker merely dream of riding home to his love, with nature turning against and even mocking him: Es säuselt der Wind in den Blättern, Es spricht der Eichenbaum: Was willst Du, törichter Reiter, Mit deinem törichten Traum?1485

Both Heinean and Byronic disillusionment is a result of time and experience. Floating on an illusory wave that seems to carry the speakers back to their natural homes, and deceived by a cosy sense of security and natural integration, there comes a sudden, bleak sense of expulsion from Paradise, a frightening awareness of destitution and aimlessness. It is Childe Harold’s knowledge that his pilgrimage on the ocean of death has neither an aim nor a purpose, that Paradise Lost is the ultimate condition of the heirs of Adam and Eve: Mein Liebchen, wir saßen beisammen, Traulich im leichten Kahn. Die Nacht war still, und wir schwammen Auf weiter Wasserbahn. Die Geisterinsel, die schöne, Lag dämmrig im Mondenglanz; Dort klangen liebe Töne, Und wogte der Nebeltanz. Dort klang es lieb und lieber, Und wogt’ es hin und her ; Wir aber schwammen vorüber, Trostlos auf weitem Meer.1486

Here, time is relentless and cruel, a mere tempus edax without any healing or regenerative power. In Positive Romanticism there had been a saving anamnesis, 1484 Ibid. Lebensgruß, ed. cit. I. 63–64. 1485 Ibid. LVIII, ed. cit. I. 99. 1486 Ibid. XLII, ed. cit. I. 92.

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in conjunction with a faith in Paradise Regained restored by time. Blake’s illusions of innocence and Paradise (Songs of Innocence, thesis) are followed by increasing awareness of destruction and Paradise Lost (Songs of Experience, antithesis), ending in true visions of salvation and Paradise Regained (Prophetic Books, synthesis). In his Book of Thel (1789) – Greek h]kgsir meaning desire – desire drives the soul into its mortal life but also drives it back to its home – the world beyond – enriched by the experience of mortality and sexuality. Paradise Regained is more than Paradise, and innocence is improved by the experience of Paradise Lost: the synthesis of thesis and antithesis. Wordsworth’s childish delusions of harmony are followed by increasing disappointment and despondency, to end in something higher : despondency corrected. Man, growing older, must increasingly meet with pain and dejection, lose his initial visions, and become more and more materialistic, only to recover his earlier anamnetic visions of the ideal, pointing to the certainty of a better world here or hereafter with the help of Romantic prophet-poets as successors to the Gnostic pmeulatij|i. The old phoenix must die in order to be renewed out of its own ashes. In their contrary anthropology, the Negative Romantics discredited this myth of the phoenix by ironical inversion. In the course of his life through his seven or ten ages – from childhood to old age via adolescence and adult maturity – man grows more and more disappointed, disillusioned, and disbelieving through a lifelong chain of unavoidable false expectations and their subsequent unavoidable destructions by reality. Man, unable to learn the lessons of history and life, has renewed deceptive visions, though increasingly recognized as meteors and ignes fatui. In Byron’s verse the phoenix is doomed finally to die, not to be resurrected.1487 The antithesis of experience is always the last stage. In Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, we encounter an adult Byronic hero whom life has already disappointed so as to feel premature old age, like Byron himself: We wither from our youth, we gasp away – Sick – sick; unfound the boon – unslaked the thirst, Though to the last, in verge of our decay, Some phantom lures, such as we sought at first – But all too late, – so are we doubly cursed. Love, fame, ambition, avarice – ’tis the same, Each idle – and all ill – and none the worst – For all are meteors with a different name, And Death the sable smoke where vanishes the flame.1488

1487 Byron, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 1809, lines 210 and 959. In Lines addressed to the Rev. J.T. Becher, 1806, lines 13–16, the myth of the phoenix appears as an unreal promise. 1488 Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 4. 124. 1–9.

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The Turkish slave-market where Juan is being offered for sale – together with John Johnson, whose acquaintance he makes on that sad occasion – forms a pivotal scene in Don Juan. Here Johnson, an experienced man of 30, is the first to correct Juan’s immature optimism, giving him an analysis of man and society that the sequel fully confirms. It is not too bold to assert that Johnson is, at least in part, a self-portrait of Byron, whom he resembles in age, nationality, and resignation to the injustices of fate. Despite having abruptly fallen from the summit of enjoyment and happiness twice, Juan still refuses to admit that all the warm feelings and high prospects of his youth are mere illusions. He is shocked to hear Johnson speak lightly of the desertion of his third wife as being a matter of course, and to view life as a sequence of passing illusions under the image of a snake cyclically throwing off its originally bright and fresh skin. The image symbolizes the merely circular evolution of all private, as well as national and universal, history : ‘All, when life is new, Commence with feelings warm and prospects high; But time strips our illusions of their hue, And one by one in turn, some grand mistake Casts off its bright skin yearly like the snake. ’Tis true, it gets another bright and fresh, Or fresher, brighter ; but the year gone through, This skin must go the way too of all flesh Or sometimes only wear a week or two. – Love’s the first net which spreads its deadly mesh; Ambition, Avarice, Vengeance, Glory, glue The glittering lime-twigs of our latter days, Where still we flutter on for pence or praise.’1489

Both love and war are dangerous delusions that man follows despite recognizing their inherent danger. Juan himself narrowly escapes death twice as a result of his vain love for Julia and Haid8e, and a third almost fatal love affair soon follows, yet he is blind to the truth contained in Johnson’s views, the deep pessimism of which appears most clearly from his conduct. Although he is aware of the vanity and dangers of his profession, his passion “for pence or praise” has 1489 Byron, Don Juan, 5. 21. 4–8 and 5. 22. 1–8. For the related image of a bird caught fluttering in a deadly mesh, illustrative of man’s vain efforts fully to recover the illusions of his lost youth and of the inescapable slow death of his heart, cf. Byron, Translation of a Romaic Love Song, lines 13–16: A bird of free and careless wing Was I, through many a smiling spring; But caught within the subtle snare, I burn, and feebly flutter there.

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made him a soldier and forces him, later, to rejoin Suvorov’s army and risk his life in the Battle of Ismail. Even at the critical stage of the battle when Juan is separated from his corps and instinctively seeks the greatest danger1490, Johnson retreats only to rally other soldiers before flinging himself “back into the heaviest fire”.1491 The difference between Johnson and Juan is the difference between a novice and an experienced soldier, but Johnson’s greater knowledge does not elicit wiser behaviour1492. The enlightened and the ignorant are victims of the same human nature to the same extent, making them act foolishly. Men’s behaviour resembles moths, whose nature compels them to fling themselves into the fire in which they perish in an ecstasy and giddiness of joy – a traditional literary image of passion’s fatality1493 repeatedly used by Byron in his description of the Battle of Ismail.1494 Viewed in this light, to the exlusion of metaphysics, war and death could not possibly be an antithesis toward a Blakean or Hegelian Platonic synthesis of love and regeneration. The metaphysical and soteriological view of reintegrating love that the Positive Romantics cultivated had found its apotheosis in German Romanticism, and its central motif of Liebestod. In Novalis’s Hymnen an die Nacht (MS 1799), for instance, the lover’s death is the moment of the ultimate, apocalyptic overcoming of all separations, a descent into the night which leads to reunion with his lost love in an eternal world beyond. Thus, in Positive Romanticism, Weltschmerz and Todessehnsucht were constructive feelings, expectant yearnings for certain eternity – a Platonic-Christian belief universalized in a syncretic Romantic religion. In Negative Romanticism, by contrast, Weltschmerz and Todessehnsucht were destructive feelings, results of Weltekel, spleen, and ennui – non-expectant yearnings for overcoming the absurdity of life in unregenerative oblivion and death. Instances from Byron need not be repeated. Instances from Heine are legion in his “Lyrisches Intermezzo”, with poems in which the speaker imagines himself in his grave, together with his love. He imagines an ecstatic embrace of cold corpses, exulting in the finality of their common death and despising the mythical resurrection surrounding them on Judgment Day.1495

1490 Byron, Don Juan, 8. 32. 8. 1491 Ibid. 8. 41. 8. 1492 Similarly, the experienced Byron, when looking back on his behaviour in early youth, repeatedly realized that nothing had substantially changed, as in Detached Thoughts, 79 (1821), ed. cit. IX. 40: “[…] I was a fool then – and am not much wiser now.” 1493 See e. g. Petrarch’s 19th Sonnet, in: Rime, Trionfi, e Poesie Latine, ed. Neri – Martellotti – Bianchi – Sapegno, Milan 1951, 21. 1494 Byron, Don Juan, 7. 44. 8 and 8. 118. 3–4. 1495 Heine, Buch der Lieder, Lyrisches Intermezzo, XXXII, 1822–1823, 1827, in: Sämtliche Schriften, I. 87.

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Elsewhere he equated the loss of his love with the loss of his life and hope, yearning for the abyss, primordial night, and le grand n8ant of oblivion: Mir erloschen ist der süßen Liebessterne goldne Pracht, Abgrund gähnt zu meinen Füßen – Nimm mich auf, uralte Nacht!1496

And, as a culmination to ‘Lyrisches Intermezzo’, the speaker of the collection’s penultimate poem describes a dream within a dream of doubly disappointed love and illusions of reunion. His love had cruelly deserted him, driving him to suicide, and now he dreams that on Judgment Day she encourages him to resurrection and the healing of the wounds that she had inflicted. The spoiler and femme fatale appears in the false pose of a Dantesque saviour, “Das EwigWeibliche”, treacherously promising to draw him heavenward only to throw him down again. As in Byron and, later, in Poe and Rossetti, Wordsworthian “despondency corrected” brings only cruel disappointment: Es bat so sanft, so lieblich, Ich konnt nicht widerstehn; Ich wollte mich erheben Und zu der Liebsten gehn. Da brachen auf die Wunden, Da stürzt’ mit wilder Macht Aus Kopf und Brust der Blutstrom, Und sieh! – ich bin erwacht.1497

Beddoes’s “The Phantom-Wooer” (MS 1844–1848), one of his last poems, thus inverts the Platonic maxims of eros kai thanatos and soma sema so as to wish for ultimate annihilation. The ghost that loved the fair lady did not call her heavenward to eternal bliss, but downward to the eternal oblivion of Poesque decomposition: Young soul, put off your flesh, and come With me into the quiet tomb, Our bed is lovely, dark and sweet; […] Ever singing ‘die, oh! die.’1498

Baudelaire is akin to Byron, Heine, and Beddoes insofar as unregenerated death is the only possible promise of salvation from “spleen” and “ennui”. The final 1496 Ibid. LXIII, lines 5–8, ed. cit. I. 102. 1497 Ibid. LXIV, lines 37–44, ed. cit. I. 103. 1498 Beddoes, The Phantom-Wooer, lines 11–13, 20, in: Selected Poetry, ed. cit. 32.

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section of Les fleurs du mal (1857), “La mort”, concludes with famous stanzas giving expression to Decadent nostalgie de l’8tranger and recherche du nouveau. They pervert the Christian metaphor of the passage of life on the saving ship of the church, as well as the metaphysical motif of Romantic Wanderlust and Sehnsucht. The joyously expectant call for embarkation to the last cruise replaces religious nostalgia for the home-world beyond by the mere nauseated desire to escape this known world’s ugliness and chaos, as well as disillusioned man’s taedium vitae. The stanzas would inform numerous later poems, such as Mallarm8’s “Brise marine” (1865) and Rimbaud’s “Le bateau ivre” (1871): O Mort, vieux capitaine! levons l’ancre! Ce pays nous ennuie, i Mort! Appareillons! Si le ciel et la mer sont noirs comme de l’encre, Nos cœurs que tu connais sont remplis de rayons! Verse-nous ton poison pour qu’il nous r8conforte! Nous voulons, tant ce feu nous br0le le cerveau, Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel, qu’importe? Au fonds de l’Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau!1499

1499 Baudelaire, Les fleurs du mal, La mort, Le voyage VIII, lines 1–8, in: Œuvres complHtes, ed. cit. 127.

VIII The Falseness of Philosophical Essentialism and Systems

A recent study has shown how violently Byron fought against the nascent binary opposition of a male and female sex, especially in the harem scene of Don Juan,1500 in the context of his period’s change of paradigm from the one-sex to the two-sex model. This involved his doubt of a narrow sexual morality allegedly inherent in nature as it came to shape the Victorian age. With his knowledge of the Classical Tradition of Greece and Rome and his own bisexuality and erotic promiscuity, he had good reason to doubt that such foundational distinctions as between sanity and madness or heterosexuality and homosexuality, or indeed truth and falsehood or moral good and moral evil, did justice to “life’s infinite variety”.1501 In his “Preface” to his didactic satirical poem The Sceptic (1809), Byron’s friend and designated literary executor Thomas Moore distinguished two kinds of scepticism. He advocated a “mild”, or “rational and well-regulated scepticism”, modelled on that of the ancients (Pyrrho, Sextus Empiricus) who “doubted for the purpose of investigating”, as opposed to the moderns (Hume) who “investigated for the purpose of doubting”.1502 Byron, however, was not interested in academic epistemology, but rather in saving the reader from indoctrination and showing the beneficent effects of sceptic ataraxia and epoche, tranquillity of mind gained through indecision.1503 He never commits himself to a truth – and not even to a probability in the sense of Hume’s epistemology – and eschews the contradiction of sceptics that made a dogma of the impossibility of dogmatizing by doubting doubt itself. His excursions into heretical theology, as in his biblical dramas, are meant to provoke doubt rather than preach heterodox 1500 Richard C. Sha, Perverse Romanticism: Aesthetics and Sexuality in Britain 1750–1832, Baltimore MD 2009, 259. 1501 Byron, Don Juan, 15. 19. 2. Byron here quotes Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, II/2, 241 (Cleopatra’s “infinite variety”). 1502 Moore, The Sceptic, Preface, 1809, in: British Satirists 1785–1840, ed. John Strachan et al., London 2003, V. 48–49. 1503 Anthony Howe, Byron and the Forms of Thought, 18–20 and passim.

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truths. His free poetics of pararhymes, enjambments, and digressions formally underscores this refusal of dogmas:1504 ‘Que sÅais-je?’ was the motto of Montaigne, As also of the first Academicians: That all is dubious which Man may attain, Was one of their most favourite positions. There’s no such thing as certainty, that’s plain As any of Mortality’s Conditions: So little do we know what we’re about in This world, I doubt if doubt itself be doubting.1505

Byron recommended this sceptical indecision again and again, as when the speaker of Don Juan considers the perspectives that make Napoleon either a man of laudable firmness or its contrary, a man of mere pertinacity : I leave it to your people of sagacity To draw a line between the false and true.1506

“In short, I deny nothing, but doubt everything”, Byron wrote to his friend, the theologian Francis Hodgson.1507 This was in 1811, the year of Kleist’s suicide and only a few years after his raising doubts that what we see and believe is not the truth, which was fed by his reading of Kant’s late Enlightenment philosophy of cognition (Kantkrise). In a letter to his fianc8e Wilhelmine von Zenge, Kleist expatiated on the subjectivity and unreliability of all human knowledge on this side of the grave: Wir können nicht entscheiden, ob das, was wir Wahrheit nennen, wahrhaftig Wahrheit ist, oder ob es uns nur so scheint.1508

In Kleist’s plays and narratives (and also decades later in Emily Bront[’s Wuthering Heights), men begin to go wrong the very moment they believe to have come to the knowledge of a truth. The original version of Kleist’s Der zerbrochene Krug (1806) has a final scene in which Counsellor Walter offers Eve a bag of Spanish pure gold coins to ransom her if he should be sent to war in the Dutch East Indies, and to be refunded with ruinous interest if he should remain in Utrecht. The representative of the new order thus joins the corruption of the ancien r8gime represented by Judge Adam. 1504 1505 1506 1507 1508

This is what Howe means by ‘forms of thought’. Byron, Don Juan, 9. 17. 1–8. Ibid. 14. 90. 4–6. Byron, Letter to Francis Hodgson, 4 December 1811, in Letters and Journals, II. 136. Kleist, Letter to Wilhelmine von Zenge, 22 March 1801, in: Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, IV. 205. See Tim Mehigan, The Scepticism of Heinrich von Kleist, in: The Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism, 256–273.

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Just as pure gold loses its innocence in contact with the world, so do truth and justice, which exist as abstract ideas only. This explains Eve’s disorientation at her rejection of the gold, which steers the audience’s disorientation: Ob ihr mir Wahrheit gabt? O scharfgeprägte, Und Gottes leuchtend Antlitz drauf. O Himmel! Daß ich nicht solche Münze mehr erkenne.1509

Kleist here echoed doubts that are also raised throughout Tieck’s William Lovell (1795–1796). Here it is Balder, a visionary rather than pathological madman of the Classical Tradition, who is aware of man’s cognitive limitations and sharpens his friend’s – the titular hero’s – insight into the fabrication of all our systems of thought. Inspired by the philosophy of Fichte whom Tieck had met in Jena, Balder and William Lovell suspect that the world and its moral norms are projections of the ego, which is itself immersed in impenetrable obscurity. The cognitive light in Plato’s philosophy is a dim glimmer, much too weak to penetrate the darkness both without and within man. In trying to understand both, man loses himself beyond all orientation: Die Wesen sind, weil wir sie dachten, In trüber Ferne liegt die Welt, Es fällt in ihre dunkeln Schachten Ein Schimmer, den wir mit uns brachten: Warum sie nicht in wilde Trümmer fällt? Wir sind das Schicksal, das sie aufrecht hält! […] […] mein ganzes Leben ist nur ein Traum, dessen mancherlei Gestalten sich nach meinem Willen formen. Ich selbst bin das einzige Gesetz in der ganzen Natur, diesem Gesetz gehorcht alles. Ich verliere mich in eine weite, unendliche Wüste, – ich breche ab.1510

It is exactly this scepticism as a method of doubting cognition and religious belief, combined with a loss of moral orientation, that destroys the life of Polidori’s orphaned Ernestus Berchtold. He cannot possibly see that his beloved wife Louisa is his sister any more than he can possibly understand the aim and purpose of the world as taught by his foster father, the good but na"ve Swiss pastor Berchtold, whose small church is dwarfed by the gigantic Alps, against whose snows and glaciers it can offer no protection. Reintegrative metaphysical cognition through love and “speculation”, discredited on all levels throughout Byron’s and Polidori’s works, is subtly satirized in Hoffmann’s “Der Sandmann” (1816). Mistaking the automaton Olimpia for a 1509 Kleist, Der zerbrochene Krug, Variant, 1806, scene XII, in: Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, I. 376. 1510 Tieck, William Lovell, 1795–1796, ed. cit. 168–169.

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passionate human creature responding to his love, the mad Nathanael believes that he has a glimpse of both his true self and the Olympic world beyond, quite contrary to the scepticism of his sane friends: “[…] nur in Olimpias Liebe finde ich mein Selbst wieder. […] diese wenigen Worte [Olimpia’s ‘Ach, ach!’] erscheinen als echte Hieroglyphe der innern Welt voll Liebe und hoher Erkenntnis des geistigen Lebens in der Anschauung des ewigen Jenseits”.1511

From Socrates to Descartes, knowledge of the world had been thought to be dependent on knowledge of the self – nosce teipsum – but the onslaught of Enlightenment scepticism with philosophers such as David Hume, as we have seen, meant the stability of the self was no longer taken for granted. Jean Paul’s novels, tales, and letters, for instance, attest to his doubts about the possibility of knowledge through cognition of the self, raising his model Sterne’s literary play with knowledge and identity to the level of existential doubt as to the stability of our rational and emotional insights: “Daraus folgt aber die Ungewißheit, ob ich existiere: denn dieses Existenzpostulat ist aufs blosse Gefühl gebaut”.1512 Later, this doubt was radicalized by Byron and culminated in his admirer Nietzsche’s negation of all capability of self-knowledge: “Wir sind uns unbekannt, wir Erkennenden, wir selbst uns selbst […]”.1513 In a recent work of scholarship on Byron, the author argues against the widespread assumption that he was not a philosopher, and shows him as grappling with the problems posed by the sceptical strain of eighteenth-century philosophy. She convincingly shows that Byron came to believe “that stable objective knowledge or truth does not exist”, and that he progressively arrived at the conclusion “that all so-called knowledge is in fact manufactured, subjective belief”.1514 Don Juan, we have seen, expressed the culmination of his scepticism as he left the construction of sense and genre to the reader, and shared Hume’s conviction that in philosophy even doubt should be subjected to doubt.1515 In Venetia (1837), Disraeli captured this radical scepticism in the discussions of the Pyrrhonist Plantagenet Cadurcis (modelled on Byron) with the Platonist Marmion Herbert (chiefly modelled on Percy Shelley). To Cadurcis-Byron, truth

1511 Hoffmann, Nachtstücke, Der Sandmann, 1816, in: Sämtliche poetischen Werke, ed. cit. I. 634. Satirical reference to the Preromantic and Romantic theory of original coded language (Lord Monboddo, G.H. Schubert). 1512 Jean Paul, Letter to Friedrich Wernlein, 11 August 1790, quoted in: Gustav Lohmann, Jean Pauls Entwicklung zum Dichter, Würzburg 1999, 337. 1513 Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse: Genealogie der Moral, Vorrede, I, 1887, in: Werke, ed. cit. VI. II. 259. 1514 Emily A. Bernhard Jackson, The Development of Byron’s Philosophy of Knowledge: Certain in Uncertainty, 2. 1515 Ibid. 184.

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is nothing but an odd collection of convenient constructions that subverts all attempts at firm belief: ‘After all, what is truth? It changes as you change your clime or your country ; it changes with the century. The truth of a hundred years ago is not the truth of the present day, and yet it may have been as genuine. Truth at Rome is not the truth of London, and both of them differ from the truth of Constantinople. For my part, I believe everything.’1516

When Byron’s Cain complains that the forbidden Tree of Knowledge, which brought misery and death into the world, was “a lying tree – for we know nothing”, Lucifer only contradicts him insofar as the tree yielded at least one certain knowledge to man: that he will be miserable and die1517. Both Lucifer and Cain doubt Adam’s consolatory belief in redemption, resurrection, and Paradise Regained. Considering that this poetic drama undermined the doctrine and authority of the churches, which supported the ruling monarchs of the postNapoleonic era, it is irrelevant whether Byron made Lucifer the spokesman of his own philosophy or not. The furious attacks on the play, and Byron’s unavoidable hypocritical denial of subversion, attest to the fact that he had reached his aim: the restoration of the old order1518. Byron’s Cain parallels Byron’s Manfred, who, as the First Destiny admits, is subject to the same sufferings as the spirits in view of unfathomable infinity. Manfred has come to know as much as clay can know and bear, meaning knowledge is both destructive and tantamount to ignorance: […] his aspirations Have been beyond the dwellers of the earth, And they have only taught him what we know – That knowledge is not happiness, and science But an exchange of ignorance for that Which is another kind of ignorance.1519

The speaker of D.G. Rossetti’s sonnet “The Dark Glass” is another restless and disillusioned seeker of knowledge which, he has come to realize with increasing experience, is, as in Manfred’s words, “beyond the dwellers of the earth”. He seeks to suppress the Byronic experience that Amor is a sadist who leads men to destruction rather than understanding and enlightenment. His ecstatic Romantic and Platonic affirmation that all-binding, redeeming love can carry him to ultimate knowledge, invalidating the biblical “here we see through a glass 1516 Disraeli, Venetia, 1837, book 6, chapter 8, in: Bradenham Edition, VII. 454. 1517 Byron; Cain, II/2, 161–167. 1518 Rutherford (ed.), Byron: The Critical Heritage, 241–247, and Byron, Letter to John Murray, 8 February 1822, IX. 103–104. 1519 Byron, Manfred, II/4, 58–63.

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darkly”,1520 is given the lie by his suspicion of nominalism and haunting doubts about real knowledge. This is not merely noise and supposition; the sonnet’s many question marks unmask the dramatic monologue’s Platonic essentialism as its speaker’s wishful thinking: Shall birth and death, and all dark names that be As doors and windows bared to some loud sea, Lash deaf mine ears and blind my face with spray ; And shall my sense pierce love, – the last relay And ultimate outpost of eternity?1521

In the title of his best-known collection of Gothic tales, Le Fanu replaced the biblical “through a glass darkly” with “in a glass darkly”, thus raising doubts that we can ever know any truth except those of man’s duality and history’s absurd circles. Looking in a mirror, Dr Hesselius, the narrator of “Green Tea”, sees the malevolent side of the benevolent and respectable Reverend Jennings, “with a face so dark and wild that I should hardly have known him”.1522 Neither his German metaphysical medicine, based on Schelling’s German Idealist philosophy, nor Dr Harley’s school medicine, based on English empiricism, nor the Reverend Jennings’s theology and unheard prayers for deliverance, nor Romantic psychoanalysis, based on the Romantic exploration of the unconscious and its dreams, can conclusively account for Jennings’s haunting, black, vicious doppelganger monkey. Neither can Dr Hesselius nor the Reverend Thomas Herbert, the intradiegetic narrator, come to a conclusion as to the evil, ugly, tormenting doppelganger of the apparently honourable Captain Barton: finding him to be the projection of a guilty conscience due to a rumoured hidden crime, a symptom of progressive madness, or the avenging father of the girl whom Barton is rumoured to have abused and ruined. “Until the secrets of the earth shall be no longer hidden […] these transactions must remain shrouded in their original obscurity”.1523 The same is the case with the combined doppelganger heroines and the vampire wiederganger, or revenant, in “Carmilla”, based on Coleridge’s “Christabel” (1816). Neither Buffon’s Enlightenment and ancien-r8gime system of the order of nature – which has no category for vampires and hippogriffins – nor Laura’s father’s Christian belief and ridicule of pagan superstitions, nor Dr Hesselius himself can provide a final orientation for the reader in search of truth. Contradictory theories are juxtaposed but not falsified so as to arrive at a 1520 I Corinthians 13, 12. 1521 D.G. Rossetti, The House of Life, The Dark Glass, 1881, lines 4–8, in: Collected Poetry and Prose, 142. 1522 Le Fanu, In a Glass Darkly, Green Tea, 1872, ed. cit. 16. 1523 Le Fanu, In a Glass Darkly, The Familiar, 81.

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conclusion. All the reader can see in the dark glass is that evil will always be the reverse of good, because the multiple killing of vampires by stakes, beheading, and burning can hardly be expected to guarantee the ultimate death of vampires buried in their graves for 150 years.1524 Crime and chaos from the graves, corresponding to the subterranean caverns in the previous Gothic novels and tales, will repeatedly erupt to disturb all the order imposed upon the world by politicians and scientists. Le Fanu was heavily influenced by Hoffmann’s and Poe’s tales of mystery and imagination, Poe drawing heavily on Hoffmann. They all feature unreliable narrators not only in their doubtful explanations of the world, but also in their telling of events. In “Der Sandmann” (1816), for instance, the reader is left disorientated, unsure whether Coppelius and Coppola are identical or mere projections of the child-traumatized protagonist Nathanael’s lively imagination, elicited from an emotionally involved, unreliable narrator. Everything in the novella is perspective, underscored by the recurrent mentioning of eyes and the leitmotif of the glass (“Perspektiv”) of Coppola, the Italian seller of glasses with a telling name referring to the Italian word for an eye socket (“coppo”). In Fichtean terms, everything visible to us is phainoumenon instead of noumenon, as consciousness is not based in anything out of itself. Nathanael’s beloved Clara is alternately wise and childish, emotionally warm and cold, all depending on changing perspectives, so that the perspectivism of Romantic epistemology is pushed to the extreme, leaving the reader totally disorientated and driving Nathanael to suicide in ultimate pre-Poesque monomania. Seen through a glass, even the dead automaton Olimpia temporarily appears to him as being warm and alive. Following Hoffmann’s, Tieck’s, and Poe’s models, Le Fanu’s speakers are all unreliable on all levels. The fictitious editor of In a Glass Darkly, with a title and motif recalling Hoffmann, retells rather than edits the fictitious manuscripts of the erratic Dr Hesselius, leaving out passages, translating others from German and French, and adding his incongruous and unconvincing comments based on Hesselius’s failed attempts at cognition; Dr Hesselius, again, retold the various characters’ narrations both from memory and from his very individual perspective. In this multiplication of unreliability Le Fanu is even more radical than Poe. Poe’s mostly (and to varying degrees) unreliable narrators can be more or less aware of their own unreliability, which steers the reader’s lack of orientation. It is not always clear whether they actually saw the events they describe or dreamed them under the influence either of pangs of conscience for involuntary crimes or of a feverish imagination further heated and confused by drugs. The narrator of the first version of Poe’s “The Oval Portrait”, “Life in Death” (1842), for instance, admits his lack of objectivity when the events occurred; and the 1524 Le Fanu, In a Glass Darkly, Carmilla, 1872, ed. cit. 315–316.

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reader’s knowledge of his vivid imagination and habitual consumption of drugs perpetuates scepticism even about the retrospective account of those events in general: No doubt it was this very reeling of my senses – it was the dull delirium which already oppressed me – that prevented me from perceiving the incoherence of my reason – which blinded me to the folly of defining any thing as either large or small where I had no preconceived standard of comparison.1525

In the tale’s final version, the reader’s uncertainty is awakened by the entranced narrator’s choice of words, “doubt” and “seemed”, in concert with the uncertain light of the dark room. The narrator’s self-assurance is mere wishful thinking in the awareness of a confused sight and memory : I now saw aright and could not and would not doubt; for the first flashing of the candles upon that canvas had seemed to dissipate the dreamy stupor which was stealing over my senses, and to startle me at once into waking life.1526

Here, uncertainty about the truth of sense perception matches uncertainty about truth and value in general. Poe, an avid reader of Hoffmann’s fiction, was a sceptic in the tradition of Byron and a master of Romantic Irony haunted by doubts of cognition and a wisely, teleologically structured world. In his Marginalia of June 1849, he slashed at all systems and claims to ultimate truths in the half-despairing, half-mocking way of Byron’s diaries and letters: It is laughable to observe how easily any system of Philosophy can be proved false: – but then is it not mournful to perceive the impossibility of even fancying any particular system to be true?1527

In classical antiquity, the philosopher Pyrrho (as reported by Sextus Empiricus) had taught that no truth, let alone The Truth, existed in any essentialist or foundationalist sense, i. e. with a claim to universal validity. Values such as beauty and deformity, good and evil, and justice and injustice were non-genetic; all indifferent, undistinguished, !di\voqoi. Their distinction was artificially constructed by various human civilizations and customs, inscribing consistency into the complex and contingent inconsistency of the universe. Such sceptical Pyrrhonism had never died, but accompanied the major current of subsequent essentialist systems, much as Gnosticism accompanied Christian orthodoxy in a steady countercurrent – submerged, yet breaking out in certain periods of stress and doubt to threaten established opinion. It largely shaped the Fin-de-SiHcle philosophy of Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. The short-lived “individual in his 1525 Poe, Life in Death, 1842, in: Graham’s Magazine, 20 (1842), 200–201. 1526 Poe, The Oval Portrait, 1845, in: Collected Works, II. 663–4. 1527 In: Essays and Reviews, ed. G.R. Thompson, Library of America, New York 1984, 1458. Quoted in: G.R. Thompson, Poe’s Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales, 165.

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isolation”, Pater argued, has neither the time nor the cognitive capacity for system-building and facile dogmatism.1528 Symbolism in literature and impressionism in painting and music were artistic expressions of man’s cognitive incapacity and isolation, replacing the illusion of intersubjective truth with personal impressions meant to spark off the reader’s, viewer’s, or hearer’s own – very subjective – impressions. In Wilde’s Salom8 (1891), for instance, almost all observations are conveyed through similes that can radically contradict each other, as when Salom8 sees the moon as a chaste, cold virgin, whereas her stepfather Herod Antipas sees it as a hot, libidinous woman burning for love. With the Great War (1914–1918) and its literal “blasting” of traditional forms and norms,1529 scepticism became the main current in Modernism, even more so in Postmodernism and Poststructuralism.1530 The existence of a firm, pre-established, normative basis of human life lost more and more credit as the ground was ploughed and shaken by trenches and explosives, defiled by human excrement and dead bodies of men and animals, where mass killings were preached as a Christian patriot’s duty, and where soldiers in gas masks looked like pigs. The American philosopher Richard Rorty, who opposes all foundationalist epistemology, applies a Freudian model when he classifies theological and philosophical system building as symptom of an obsessive cleanliness neurosis, unhealthy in its deviation from historical experience.1531 Romantic Disillusionism stood in that Pyrrhonian tradition of philosophical heterodoxy and theological heresy. As early as 1804, Klingemann’s night watchman Kreuzgang, having viciously raised a false alarm about the end of the world, expresses his epistemological doubts in haranguing the scared and unmasked population of his city : ‘Gebt der Wahrheit die Ehre, was habt ihr vollbracht, das der Mühe wert wäre? Ihr Philosophen zum Beispiel, habt ihr bis jetzt etwas Wichtigeres gesagt, als daß Ihr nichts zu sagen wüßtet?’1532

Fitzgerald’s wise, experienced, disillusioned Omar Khayy#m admits that as a young man he studied philosophy and theology in a frustrated attempt at explaining the sense and aim of the world. The result of his efforts was not progress but absurd circularity, arriving at the same ignorance from which he started. Fitzgerald merged Omar’s sceptic observations with those of John 1528 Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, Conclusion, 1873, in Works, ed. cit. I. 235. 1529 See the title of the periodical of the Vorticist movement, Blast (1914). 1530 Rolf Lessenich, “Where death becomes absurd and life absurder”: Literary Views of the Great War 1914–1918, in: Erfurt Electronic Studies in English, 2 (1999). Multimedia File. Last accessed 15 June 2016. 1531 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, chapter 2 The Contingency of Selfhood, 23–43. 1532 Klingemann, Nachtwachen, 62.

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Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, that man, taking sinful pride in his wisdom, acts foolishly in destroying his happiness by seeking to know the world he should enjoy :1533 Myself when young did eagerly frequent Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument About it and about: but evermore Came out by the same Door as I went in. With them the Seed of Wisdom did I sow, And with my own hand labour’d it to grow ; And this was all the Harvest that I reap’d – ‘I came like Water, and like Wind I go.’ Into this Universe, and why not knowing, Nor whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing: And out of it, as Wind along the Waste, I know not whither, willy-nilly blowing. […] Then to the rolling Heaven itself I cried, Asking, ‘What Lamp had Destiny to guide Her little Children stumbling in the Dark?’ And – ‘A blind Understanding!’ Heav’n replied.1534

Such wise scepticism and agnosticism appear as healthy because belief in insight creates fundamentalism, which creates systems, which produce conflicting sects and wars. The admission of ignorance and recourse to wine, love, and poetry reconciles, and even prevents, religious dissensions: The Grape that can with Logic absolute The Two-and-Seventy jarring Sects confute: The subtle Alchemist that in a Trice Life’s leaden Metal into Gold transmute. […] But leave the Wise to wrangle, and with me The Quarrel of the Universe let be:

1533 Rochester, A Satire against Mankind, 1680, lines 33–34. 1534 Fitzgerald, Rub#iy#t of Omar Khayy#m, 1859, stanzas 27–29 and 33 (first edition), ed. cit. 246–248.

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And, in some corner of the Hubbub coucht Make Game of that which makes as much of Thee.1535

Except for its Epicureanism and optimistic mood, this anticipated the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, the drama of Samuel Beckett, and the Postmodern conviction that all creeds, systems, norms, forms, and values are made up to inscribe pattern, order, and homogeneity upon a contingent, inscrutable, and heterogeneous world full chance and lacking in finality. Byron was an avid and avowed reader of Montaigne, “the only great writer of past times whom he read with avowed satisfaction”,1536 mentioning him again and again – along with Pyrrho, Cicero, Pierre Bayle, David Hume, and Sir William Drummond. Leopardi was another admirer of Montaigne. In his later philosophical works, Leopardi repeatedly expressed his conviction that man will rather have recourse to silly beliefs than admit the fact that he knows nothing, is nothing, and has nothing to hope for after death.1537 Not being grounded in a real world beyond, man is conceived as a sense-seeker and pattern-builder in search of physical and metaphysical fixedness. The wishful thinking or “desiring phantasy” of “religion” with its trumped-up myths, in the original sense of “religare”,1538 constructs what he needs. Advancing a “creed against all creeds”, Byron held a “sceptic’s faith”.1539 Speaking of Egeria, the mythical nymph who instructed the Roman king Numa Pompilius in his wise legislation, Byron again doubted the ontological truth of all myth. Egeria was fictitiously imagined in order to construct a metaphysical foundation of jakoj!cah_a, beauty and justice: Egeria! sweet creation of some heart Which found no mortal resting-place so fair As thine ideal breast […]1540

This repeats the doubts of Tieck’s William Lovell, who suspects that all logical and moral order is simply the projection of will and reason upon chaos. The creation of an orderly world according to measure, number and weight (Ecclesiasticus 1, 3) is then a biblical myth generated by man:

1535 Ibid. stanzas 43 and 45, ed. cit. 258. 1536 Leigh Hunt, Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, London, 1828, I. 78. Byron marked passages in Hunt’s copy of Montaigne’s essays. 1537 Leopardi, Zibaldone, in: Tutte le opere, II. 79 et passim. Cf. ibid. Leopardi’s formulation “la nullit/ della vita umana.” 1538 The original meaning is the custom among sailors of binding themselves to the masts of their ships in tempests. 1539 D.J. Leigh, Infelix Culpa: Poetry and the Skeptic’s Faith in Don Juan, in: Keats-Shelley Journal, 28 (1979), 120–138. Also see the studies by Cooke, Gleckner, and Marjarum. 1540 Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 4. 115. 1–3.

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Wüst und chaotisch liegt alles umher, unkenntlich und ohne Form […]; aber mein Verstand, dessen erstes Prinzip der Gedanke von Ordnung, Ursach und Wirkung ist, findet alles im genauesten Zusammenhange, weil er seinem Wesen nach das Chaos nicht bemerken kann. […] Die Wesen sind, weil wir sie dachten, In trüber Ferne liegt die Welt, Es fällt in ihre dunkeln Schachten Ein Schimmer, den wir mit uns brachten: Warum sie nicht in wilde Trümmer fällt? Wir das Schicksal, das sie aufrecht hält!1541

It also echoes the sceptical wisdom of Klingemann’s Kreuzgang, who takes pride in a modern imitatio Dei, reflecting God’s mad, amoral universe in his own mad, amoral inconsistency, be it only for the purpose of the later construction of order and sense upon chaos and nonsense: […] habe ich im Gegenteil stets eine besondere Vorliebe für die Tollheit gehabt und es zu einer absoluten Verworrenheit in mir zu bringen gesucht, eben um, wie unser Herrgott, erst ein gutes und vollständiges Chaos zu vollenden, aus welchem sich nachher gelegentlich, wenn es mir einfiele, eine leidliche Welt zusammenordnen ließe.1542

Simultaneously, it repeats the sceptical mal du siHcle of Senancour’s Oberman who suspects religions to be useful but mendacious fabrications made by man for his own comfort, because the truth or falsehood of religion will never be proved in this world: La religion finit toutes ces anxi8t8s; elle fixe tant d’incertitudes, elle donne un but qui n’8tant jamais atteint, n’est jamais d8voil8; elle nous assujettit pour nous mettre en paix avec nous-mÞmes; elle nous promet des biens dont l’espoir reste toujours, parce que nous ne saurions en faire l’8preuve […]1543

Later, in Die romantische Schule (1836), Heine polemically sided with the Neoclassical Goethe against the Romantic Schiller in an eristic preference for “art for art’s sake”, although aestheticism is later declared barren in terms of revolution and reform.1544 To Heine, religions are mere sense constructions imposed upon chaos, succeeding each other and establishing constantly renewed (and no less constructed) ethical values that would eradicate all previous ethic art. Heine’s view of endless and aimless successions of religions without any improvement 1541 1542 1543 1544

Tieck, William Lovell, 1795–1796, ed. cit. 168. Klingemann, Nachtwachen, 57. Senancour, Oberman, letter 43, sixth year, 1804, 205. Note Heine’s attack against Goethe’s “Pantheismus und Indifferentismus”. Heine, Die romantische Schule, 1836, in: Sämtliche Schriften, III. 394.

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upon human civilizations is remarkably akin to D.G. Rossetti’s in “The Burden of Nineveh” (MS 1850): […] denn in der Kunst gäbe es keine Zwecke, wie in dem Weltbau selbst, wo nur der Mensch die Begriffe ‘Zweck und Mittel’ hineingrübelt; die Kunst, wie die Welt, sei ihrer selbst willen da, und wie die Welt ewig dieselbe bleibt, wenn auch in ihrer Beurteilung die Ansichten der Menschen unaufhörlich wechseln, so müsse auch die Kunst von den zeitlichen Ansichten der Menschen unabhängig bleiben; die Kunst müsse daher besonders unabhängig bleiben von der Moral, welche auf der Erde immer wechselt, so oft eine neue Religion emporsteigt und die alte Religion verdrängt.1545

To Tieck, Klingemann, Byron, D.G. Rossetti, and Heine, the dogma of a cosmically well-ordered and aim-orientated world, and the universal truth of an ideal of beauty and justice founded in a benevolent God, are discredited by daily experience. So is a universally valid, natural standard of good and evil. Nietzsche, in whom all the various expressions of Romantic Scepticism converged and culminated, made his Zarathustra the propagator of a radical reassessment of all values. Zarathustra, the founder of the old Persian religion and who had brought the errors of a dogmatically fixed ethic and natural dualism into the world, handing them on to Judaism and Christianity, must himself recant and preach their de-essentialization: Wandel der Werte – das ist Wandel der Schaffenden. Immer vernichtet, wer ein Schöpfer sein muß.1546

Later, in Ecce Homo (MS 1888–1889), Nietzsche proclaimed himself as a new saviour from the slavery of fixed, conventional morality : Umwertung aller Werte: das ist meine Formel für einen Akt höchster Selbstbesinnung der Menschheit, der in mir Fleisch und Genie geworden ist.1547

In the line from Byron to Nietzsche, Grabbe was also a remarkable radicalizer of Romantic Scepticism. His heroes, however, are historically necessary “supermen” doomed to fail in a universe dominated by circularity, senselessness, aimlessness, and petty egoism. In his early tragedy Herzog Theodor von Gothland (1827), the tragic hero, a victim of both deceit and his own good nature at odds with the chaos and ethical indifference of the world, is brought to realize the relativity and inscrutability of good and evil. Originally a “Gottesträumer” and Christian, his idealized world view cannot stand the test of reality. The play’s initial illusion of human civilization and cosmic order is destroyed, revealing vengefulness, bloodthirstiness, and a pre-Christian Germanic bellum omnium 1545 Ibid. III. 391–392. 1546 Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, Von tausend und einem Ziele, VI. 1. 71. Also cf. Von der Selbstüberwindung, VI. 1. 145. 1547 Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, Warum ich ein Schicksal bin, 1908, VI. 3. 363.

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contra omnes.1548 Desiring to do good in punishing his brother’s suspected fratricide, he himself becomes guilty of the same crime, and madness drives him to further evil. Both his ethical disorientation and his realization of the world’s causal chaos are typical of the life experience of man in Romantic Disillusionism, although driven to extremes of nihilism: Nicht einmal klug genug, um Tugend von Dem Laster klar zu unterscheiden, scheint Der Mensch gemacht zu sein, Daß über ihn die Hölle triumphiere, – Drum, wie sich auch der Edle wehrt, um nicht Zu fallen, – fallen muß er doch, Denn selbst die Taten seiner Tugend werden Zu Freveltaten durch des Schicksals Fügung.1549

This is not quite in support of the black, infernal intriguer Berdoa’s “religion of hell”, claiming synonymity between virtue and vice, and piety and stupidity.1550 However, as is customary in Romantic Disillusionism, the Devil is never totally wrong. His all-negating commentaries lay bare the higgledy-piggledy nature of an amoral universe, one that evades all attempts at epistemological, ethical, or aesthetical explanation. As in later Decadent and Fin-de-SiHcle literature, Hell is the condition of the world without and within man, characterized by din that will never harmonize and chaos that will never become ordered. It is incomprehensible, a madhouse like the myth of Hell, created by the same bungler according to the modern tragicomic testimony of the Devil in Grabbe’s Scherz, Satire, Ironie und tiefere Bedeutung (1827): […] ein mittelmäßiges Lustspiel, welches ein unbärtiger, gelbschnabeliger Engel, der in der ordentlichen, dem Menschen unbegreiflichen Welt lebt und, wenn ich nicht irre, noch in Prima sitzt, während seiner Schulferien zusammengeschmiert hat.1551

Büchner’s Woyzeck provides another subversion of valid definitions of virtue and vice. The play’s very first scene sets the sceptical tone when the captain admonishes his soldier, the titular hero, to be virtuous, but becomes confused when trying to define it. Confounding virtue and vice in the same way finally drives Woyzeck to murder his faithless Marie, both becoming victims of animal instincts that break all (doubtful) moral norms. Biblical quotations are heterogeneously juxtaposed to discredit biblical authority, and biblical injunctions appear as memorized in a kind of animal dressage, producing pangs of con1548 Helga-Maleen Gerresheim, Christian Dietrich Grabbe, in: Deutsche Dichter des 19. Jahrhunderts, ed. Benno von Wiese, 231–232. 1549 Grabbe, Herzog Theodor von Gothland, III/1, I. 80. 1550 Ibid. IV/1, I. 153–154. 1551 Grabbe, Scherz, Satire, Ironie und tiefere Bedeutung, II/2, I. 258.

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science that lead to disorientation, madness, and final catastrophe. The tragedy’s open end, leaving the question of Woyzeck’s punishment unanswered, underscores the moral scepticism: in a world without pre-established order and norms, and without cosmic participation in human affairs, no order can be restored by wreaking justice upon a criminal, as is the case in Shakespearean tragedy. If Plato and St Thomas Aquinas were wrong in assuming chaos or nothingness were shaped into a universal order of multiple correspondences on all levels by a benevolent creator, the Restoration’s debate about criminal law and the Code Napoleon appeared totally futile. Byron’s own re-evaluation of ethics and the passions, which preceded Grabbe and Büchner and influenced Nietzsche in his early period, manifested itself in his occasional approval of erotic love and condemnation of military glory. Here, as usual, Byron is unsystematic and provocative rather than dogmatic. This Systemoffenheit not only questioned traditional standards of morality, both aristocratic (military glory) and bourgeois (erotic love),1552 but also cast doubt on the universal validity and scrutability of the Platonic beautiful, good, and true. Byron’s speakers are haunted by epistemological and ethical disorientation, as are those of Leopardi and Espronceda, who suspect fundamental truths to be merely human constructions. Again, with such doubts and questions in mind, drink appears as more saving than philosophy, and unregenerated death as the only true and lasting salvation: ¿Qu8 la virtud, la pureza? ¿Qu8 la verdad y el cariÇo? Mentida ilusijn de niÇo Que halagj mi juventud? Dadme vino: en 8l se ahoguen Mis recuerdos; aturdida, Sin sentir, huya la vida Paz me traiga el ataffld.1553

True, Byron’s Lucifer confirms that “Evil and good are things in their own essence, And not made good or evil by the giver”;1554 but Lucifer argues against divine injustice, which to him is a victor’s justice, calling his own cause good and the enemy’s bad. God, the sadistic creator, gave us thirst for ultimate knowledge while at the same time depriving us of the possibility of it, and he indiscriminately punished mankind with a horrible deluge for loving his angels, an imitation of the love that divine propaganda mendaciously claimed to have caused the creation of and that governed the world: imitatio amoris Dei. This 1552 Rolf Lessenich, Lord Byron and the Nature of Man, 35–56. 1553 Espronceda, A Jarifa en una org&a, lines 9–16, I. 115. 1554 Byron, Cain, II/2, 452–453.

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first unjust punishment of love did not occur because love was evil in itself, but because the Tyrant demanded all love for himself.1555 So did his terrestrial imitators, from Phalaris via Louis XVIII and George IV to Big Brother. As, later, in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), sexual morality is seen as a mere construction of sexual politics rather than a dogma of Platonic, Aristotelian, or Christian ethics – a sceptical view then adopted by Postmodernism.1556 What distinguishes Byron’s pessimistic philosophy from that of his contemporary Arthur Schopenhauer – born in the same year (1788) – is its refusal of dogmatism. In Schopenhauer’s voluntaristic philosophy, the non-existence of God, the nothingness of the world, the mortality of the soul, man’s conscious (though unfree) will within and nature’s blind will without, the aimlessness of will and life, and the subjection of human reason to will and the passions were universally valid truths – metaphysics in spite of reality’s ultimate inscrutability.1557 To Byron, such doctrines were opinions challenging both philosophical systems and political orthodoxy. Byron therefore influenced the antisystematic paradigm of Nietzsche, especially with Manfred, Nietzsche’s admired prototype of his Übermensch. Goethe’s Faust makes a contract with the Devil, a concession to superior powers which Byron’s Manfred will not make. Manfred is a radical doubter of systems and, by consequence, an equally radical denier of obedience or deference to superior powers, both religious and political. When he refuses the Fifth Spirit’s order to kneel before the terrible throne of Arimanes, evil “Prince of the Powers”, he ironically points to infinity which is equally unfathomable to both man and spirit: Bid him [Arimanes] bow down to that which is above him, The overruling Infinite – the Maker Who made him not for worship – let him kneel, And we will kneel together.1558

On a philosophical level, this identification of the biblical Maker with the Infinite contests both revelation and religion. Conventional religion teaches belief in a revealed God who, through his revelation, becomes accessible to his creation. Hence, “religio” becomes possible in the sense of “religatio”: created beings can bind or attach themselves to their Maker, who gives them sustenance and peace, and stills their hunger and slakes their thirst in the sense of biblical imagery.1559 Infinity condescends to finitude in consecutive acts of salvation – God’s apocalypse and Christ’s incarnation. In Byron and Nietzsche, however, such religion 1555 1556 1557 1558 1559

Byron, Heaven and Earth, 1. 11–14. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics, Garden City NY 1970. Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, passim. Byron, Manfred, II/4, 46–49. E. g. Psalm 42.

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appears as cowardly man’s self-comforting illusion, reducing infinitude to familiar though stupid Biedermeier systems where he can find orientation, being too weak to sustain his Geworfenheit. Manfred, who lusts for knowledge, power, and love (libido sciendi, libido dominandi, libido coeundi) extremely and endlessly, realizes that such aspirations correspond to a never-ending universe and are unable to be confined in philosophical systems. He thus accepts that his unrest will not be calmed by peace, nor his hunger and thirst stilled by satiation. He also realizes that suicide would be supplication and that he must bear life until he finds the only salvation possible: natural death. The pre-Schopenhauerian negator of suicide and pre-Nietzschean Superman is a hero who must (and is prepared to) suffer the burdens of the human condition. On a political level, this extreme scepticism leads to disobedience. The Hall of Arimanes may be read as an allegory of an evil court of the old and new regimes, and the spirits and destinies as evil courtiers debasing themselves in abject obedience to their master’s will, yet they must realize they all share man’s condition: the illogical combination of endless striving with endless frustration. On a personal level, this extreme scepticism leads to ever-changing, and even contradictory, positions in a ceaseless round of hope and despair, laughter and tears, affirmation and destruction. Deprived of a dialectical aim, synthesis and firmness, man’s views swirl in absurd circles and defy any attempt at systematization. But disillusion is invariably the end of any expectations of synthesis, and is invariably followed by a mise en scHne of renewed false expectations. Romantic Pyrrhonism thus shaped contradictions that no interpreter of Byron, Heine, Leopardi, or others should try to solve by squeezing them into the Procrustean bed of conventional, logical coherence. Heine, for one, staged alternate poses of Romantic longing and Romantic disillusion, elegy and satire, pious prayer and heretical mockery.1560 Byron consciously leaves us without any firm and universally valid sense of epistemological, moral, or aesthetical orientation. His universe, like his view of man, is characterized by disorder, inconsistency, and unpredictability, containing, as he said of his own mind, “500 contradictory contemplations, though with but one object in view”.1561 Don Juan was expressly written in opposition to Platonism and any attempts at reducing the phenomenal variety of life into the Procrustean bed of any philosophical system: Also observe, that like the great Lord Coke, (See Littleton) whene’er I have expressed 1560 This is the case in Heine’s logically contradictory and open-ended treatise Verschiedenartige Geschichtsauffassung, 1833, III. 21–23. 1561 Byron, Letter to Thomas Moore, 5 January 1816, V. 14–15. Also see M.G. Cooke, The Blind Man Traces the Circle: On the Pattern and Philosophy of Byron’s Poetry, Princeton 1969, 141.

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Opinions two, which at first sight may look Twin opposites, the second is the best. Perhaps I have a third too in a nook, Or none at all – which seems a sorry jest; But if a writer would be quite consistent, How could he possibly show things existent?1562

In this perspective, systems are easy self-deceptions for people that prefer comfort to truth, and “a system coupled with doubt” is compared to the anticlimactic end of an artificially arranged soir8e or an opium dream – again the fall from illusion to reality.1563 Byron is in tune with Büchner’s and Grabbe’s Prinzip Zweifel, who also satirized fundamentalist and consistent philosophers as muddled dunces. This applies to Büchner’s King Peter, the Fichtean idealist in Leonce und Lena, as well as his Thomas Paine, the atheist in Dantons Tod. Büchner’s mad, tragic hero Franz Woyzeck, a much more serious philosopher than these others, reflects the world’s inconsistency in his disordered state of mind, as does the speaker of Don Juan in his disordered narration. It also applies to Grabbe’s natural historians in Scherz, Satire, Ironie und tiefere Bedeutung, who examine the Devil on their table and must deny the existence of a creature that dares to break the limits of their system.1564 Consistent essentialists such as Plato and Newton, whom Byron ironically ridiculed as writers of “good philosophy”, had to admit the limitations of their epistemologies: “scio ut nescio”.1565 The paradox, a favourite with Byron and Leopardi, reveals an interior contradiction of Pyrrhonism. On the one hand, it denies all epistemology and sees eclecticism as the only philosophical response to an inscrutable, patchwork world. On the other hand, it raises ignorance and fragmentation to the level of universal philosophical truth. When, as we have seen, Byron affirmed in a letter to his Cambridge friend Francis Hodgson that “In short, I deny nothing but doubt everything”,1566 or when he told John Murray that “Opinions are made to be changed – or how is the truth to be got at?”,1567 he implicitly made a dogma of the world’s disorder, or at least of its inscrutability. This was pure provocation in view of the fact that Hodgson, a classical scholar and translator of Juvenal, was a conservative Christian whose father had been a friend of William Gifford. Byron thus used the paradox of scio ut nescio to support his own self-contradictory “doctrine of agnosticism and eclecticism”, 1562 1563 1564 1565 1566 1567

Byron, Don Juan, 15. 87. 1–8; see Steffan and Pratt’s commentary, 739. Ibid. 16. 8–10. Grabbe, Scherz, Satire, Ironie und tiefere Bedeutung, I/1, I. 235. Byron, Don Juan, 7. 5. 1–8. Byron, Letter to Francis Hodgson, .4 December 1811, in: Letters and Journals, II. 136. Byron, Letter to John Murray, 9 May 1817, V. 221.

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either with resignative, rational distance (as in Don Juan) or with elegiac, romantic complaint (as in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage). In the latter work he applied it to the inconsistent, contradictory nature of man, which equally eluded comprehension. In his stanzas on Napoleon and Rousseau, whose irreconcilably split personalities he thought typical in corresponding to his own experience of himself, he spoke of man’s “antithetically-mixed” nature, and consequent incapacity to understand himself logically : There sunk the greatest, nor the worst of men [Napoleon], Whose spirit antithetically mixt One moment of the mightiest, and again On little objects with like firmness fixt, Extreme in all things!1568 But he [Rousseau] was phrenzied, – wherefore, who may know? Since cause might be which skill could never find; But he was phrenzied by disease or woe, To that worst pitch of all, which wears a reasoning show.1569

Both were strong, original geniuses and providential leaders whom Carlyle was later to call “heroes” and Emerson “representative men” and were nevertheless unable to quench their pettiest passions. Napoleon could command the whole world with the exception of himself. The same applies to Conrad-Lara, the Byronic hero shaped by irreconcilable extremes, whose portrait is obviously Byron’s self-portrait: In him inexplicably mix’d appear’d Much to be loved and hated, sought and fear’d.1570

Man, at first, is inexperienced and undisappointed, believing in his genetic homogeneity and rational controllability – a mirror reflecting the divine image of his maker. However, long successions of disappointments and repeated expulsions from Paradise gradually weaken that illusion until his heart will break, “yet brokenly live on: Even as a broken mirror […]”.1571 Thus, the broken mirror symbolizes the heterogeneity of man in parallel to the heterogeneity of things, doubting man’s creation in the image of a benevolent, caring deity and destination to return to original unity. That experience of fragmentation was to shape the culture of Modernism and Postmodernism, and the symbolism of broken mirrors was to return. Virginia Woolf ’s novel Between the Acts (posth. 1941), for instance, illustrated the fragmentary and contingent nature of man and things 1568 1569 1570 1571

Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 3. 36.1–5. Ibid. 3. 80. 6–9. Byron, Lara, 1814, 1. 289–290. Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 3. 32. 9 and 33. 1.

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with a heterogeneous, historical pageant torn up with pauses, noises, and blunders, with a concluding modern scene of chaos in which actors and audience view themselves in shattered mirrors. If man has no firm and final aim, forever relapsing into absurd circles, he cannot either have any firm and final character, lasting insights, and sustained and sustaining convictions. Byron’s efforts at writing poetry in opposite modes, both Romantic and Neoclassical, and even Renaissance (as in his imitations of Luigi Pulci), must be seen in this context. It was his version of Keats’s selfconcept of the “chameleon poet”, the ideal of Romantic variety driven to the extreme of irreconcilability so as to show man’s antithetically-mixed nature. Following the charges of masquerade raised in Lady Caroline Lamb’s Glenarvon (1816), Byron has often been misrepresented by his many enemies as a literary impostor, forever imitating and easily imitable, but his split, torn personality, as well as his classical education, allowed him to access various styles that he mastered. The plaintive author of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage could also, throughout his literary career, write rational, satirical works such as English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, The Vision of Judgment, and Don Juan, and even inseparably mix romance and humour in The Island (1824). In histories of literary criticism Byron figures as an advocate for spontaneous Romantic Bekenntnisdichtung, who characterized poetry as “the expression of excited passion”, “the lava of the imagination”, “in itself passion”, the result of an impulse felt as torture, ecstasy, or estro.1572 The celebrated writer of tender, self-confessing Romantic lyrics such as “When We Two Parted” (1808) and “If Sometimes in the Haunts of Men” (1812) could, from a Neoclassical stance, rudely attack Keats for the very same Romantic mode, ridiculing his “onanism of poetry”1573 and “intellectual masturbation”,1574 and defend Alexander Pope against the strictures of his Romantic editor (1806), the sentimental sonnetwriter William Lisle Bowles.1575 It was in his rational satirical mode, in Don Juan, that he also denigrated the earlier generation of male Romantic poets, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Rogers, and Thomas Moore, praising the rational public mode of Milton and the Neoclassicists: Thou shalt believe in Milton, Dryden, Pope; Thou shalt not set up Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey ; Because the first is crazed beyond all hope, The second drunk, the third so quaint and mouthey : 1572 1573 1574 1575

Ren8 Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, II. 123. Byron, Letter to John Murray, 4 November 1820, VII. 217. Byron, Letter to John Murray, 9 November 1820, VII. 225. Byron, Letter to [John Murray], on the Rev. W.L. Bowles’s Strictures on the Life and Writings of Pope, London 1821. Letters and details of the controversy (1819) in R.E. Prothero’s old edition of Byron’s Letters and Journals, London 1898–1904, Appendix III.

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With Crabbe it may be difficult to cope, And Campbell’s Hippocrene is somewhat drouthy : Thou shalt not steal from Samuel Rogers, nor – Commit – flirtation with the muse of Moore.1576

Byron would always find himself wedged between irreconcilable alternatives: Augustan and Romantic, patrician and radical, heterosexual and homosexual, sane and manic depressive.1577 Normative theories of his pathology or morbidity – the manic depressive’s duality or doubleness – have always accompanied studies of his life and work. Such normative views of Byron’s mental and moral health are, however, reductionist. His code-switching in aesthetics was no exception, as the Classical Tradition was still alive and Neoclassicism defined the broad and permeable margins of Romanticism. Burns, Hogg, Scott, Lockhart, Wilson, Moore, Peacock, Campbell, and Rogers all changed loyalties, “to one thing constant never”, wavering between the “old school” and the “new schools”, the Popean Neoclassicism of Rogers’s The Pleasures of Memory (1792) and the Romanticism of his Jacqueline, published together with Byron’s Lara (1814). Aware of the heterogeneous nature of man, Byron was an actor of varying roles, albeit one who took them seriously ; not the sentimental or histrionic impostor of Caroline Lamb’s novel and Lockhart’s letter. His admirer Heine understood Byron’s changes of opinions and modes perfectly well in his own poems on roleplaying, such as “Nun ist es Zeit” (1823). The would-be romantic and must-be realist speaker feels the time has come to abandon his High Romantic theatre role of splendid medieval knight and heroic fencer under the pressure of reason and sanity. Yet there is no longer a distinction between the mask and the person proper. The sentimental role of the past was not only played, but truly felt (“gefühlet”) as a real constituent of the speaker’s chameleon nature. And now, with a note of Romantic Irony on the change of fashion, he calls it in question, underscored by the concluding imagery of the death of Romantic Illusionism: Nun ist es Zeit, daß ich mit Verstand Mich aller Torheit entledge; Ich hab so lang als ein Komödiant Mit dir gespielt die Komödie.

1576 Byron, Don Juan, 1. 205. 1–8. Note Byron’s satirical use of pararhymes, an effective literary means to disillusionment. Byron’s reference is to Thomas Moore’s early collection of lyrics, The Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Little (1801), which, in his Neoclassical mood, he had satirized in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809). Byron and Moore were later reconciled in the house of the banker and poet Samuel Rogers and became friends; Marchand, Byron: A Portrait, 108. 1577 William Christie, The Edinburgh Review in the Literary Culture of Romantic Britain, Byron in the Forfex, London 2009, 132–134.

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Die prächtgen Kulissen, sie waren bemalt Im hochromantischen Stile, Mein Rittermantel hat goldig gestrahlt, Ich fühlte die feinsten Gefühle. Und nun ich mich gar säuberlich Des tollen Tands entledge, Noch immer elend fühl ich mich, Als spielt ich noch immer Komödie. Ach Gott! im Scherz und unbewusst Sprach ich was ich gefühlet; Ich hab mit dem Tod in der eignen Brust Den sterbenden Fechter gespielet.1578

1578 Heine, Buch der Lieder, Die Heimreise, XLIV, 1823–1824, 1827, in Sämtliche Schriften, I. 130. See the editor’s commentary on Heine’s role-plays, I. 688. The poem was congenially translated by Louis Untermeyer in Poems of Heinrich Heine, London 1923, 117: Now is it time that I should start And leave all folly behind me. As comic actor I’ve played my part In a comedy that was assigned me. The settings were painted brilliant and bold In the latest romantic fashions; My knightly mantle was splendid with gold; I thrilled with the noblest passions. And now at last I must say good-bye To speeches once distracting … But I am wretched and I sigh As though I still were acting. Oh God! unknown I spoke in jest The things I felt most deeply ; I’ve acted, with death in my very breast, The dying hero, cheaply.

Retrospect and Outlook: The Intellectual Searcher’s Negative Epiphany

In his 1805 Prelude, Wordsworth coined the term “spots of time” for momentary epiphanies that discontinued the ordinary sequence of time for a dialectical momentary re-evaluation. High expectations were followed by disillusion, isolation, and panic, ultimately leading to recovery, reintegration into the universe, and a glimpse into the very soul of things. These “spots of time” engrave themselves into the memory and, like a favourite photograph, can be viewed again and again, joining present, past, and future. Wordsworth’s chronotope has become seminal in theories of art as higher inspiration and prophecy : There are in our existence spots of time, Which with distinct pre-eminence retain A vivifying Virtue […] Such moments, worthy of all gratitude Are scatter’d everywhere, taking their date From our first childhood […]1579

It is probable that Wordsworth owed this concept of a poet’s positive epiphany to Coleridge’s conversation poems, enlarging their structure of a private and domestic epiphany into a universal one.1580 And, as we have seen, Percy Shelley, and, later, Joseph Conrad, inverted this Wordsworthian experience into a negative epiphany, a momentary vision of ultimate nothingness, “the horror” below the “painted veil”. In Die romantische Schule (1836), Heine scorned (yet secretly envied) the Positive Romantics, with their belief in spots of time and their love of wandering to a recoverable world beyond – a Paradise Regained. His often invective prose and poetry call his readers back from dreams, visions, and flights of fancy to reality ; from Romantic medievalism, with its “ungeheure Ausgeburten der Phantasie”, to the earth-bound and finite Classical Tradition of the Enlighten1579 Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1805, XI. 258–260, 274–276. 1580 James P. Davis, The “Spots of Time”: Wordsworth’s Poetic Debt to Coleridge, in: Colby Quarterly, 28 (1992), 65–84.

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ment.1581 Romantic poets are represented as lacking a classical education, to be reintroduced as an antidote to the Romantic School and its disastrous cult of infinity and spiritual ecstasies: “Die klassische Kunst hatte nur das Endliche darzustellen, und ihre Gestalten konnten identisch sein mit der Idee des Künstlers.”1582 Neither his Jewish nor his Christian education could yield the disillusioned German poet a glimpse or sense of worlds beyond, so that Hellenic enjoyment of the here and now replaced Hebraic or Nazarene expectations of future bliss: Ja, Zuckererbsen für jedermann, Sobald die Schoten platzen! Den Himmel überlassen wir Den Engeln und den Spatzen.1583

Insofar as he was willing but no longer could be a religious believer, Heine resembled D.G. Rossetti, whom both Dante Alighieri and his Protestant mother had taught the Christian faith. In “The Cloud Confines” (1870), an in nuce manifesto of Rossetti’s view of the human condition, a solitary individual of the type of Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings searches for knowledge of the “heights above”, yet vainly. Although evidently brought up as a pious believer and situated in ideal Romantic loneliness for a Positive Romantic reading of nature’s symbols, he makes the disillusioning experience that neither day nor night, and neither science nor mysticism, allow him to glimpse eternal truths. To his dismay, indifferent nature is mute and cannot speak to him: The day is dark and the night To him that would search their heart; No lips of cloud that will part Nor morning song in the light: Only, gazing alone, To him wild shadows are shown, Deep under deep unknown And height above unknown height.1584

The disillusionism and scepticism of the Last Romantics had irretrievably lost the metaphysical “re-ligio” of the Positive Romantics, who nevertheless knew about the dark sides of life and the split nature of man and had their excursions into Dark Romanticism. But the Positive Romantics had still been capable of overcoming the doubt that either overshadowed or undermined their work. In his sonnet “The Hill Summit”, D.G. Rossetti makes his speaker a “belated wor1581 1582 1583 1584

Heine, Die romantische Schule, 1836, in: Sämtliche Schriften, III. 367. Ibid. Heine, Deutschland: Ein Wintermärchen, 1844, caput 1, stanza 12, ed. cit. IV. 578. D.G. Rossetti, The Cloud Confines, lines 1–8, in: Collected Poetry and Prose, 235.

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shipper”, who travels to the sun’s altar for vesper song in the west and the casting of light on his transfigured face. However, the sun, symbol of transcendence and piety, is setting, and the speaker enjoys his last rays in his descent into the night. Like the dying swan and the twilight of the gods, the setting sun was to become a favourite image of the Decadence: And now that I have climbed and won this height, I must tread downward through the sloping shade And travel the bewildered tracks till night. Yet for this hour I still may here be stayed And see the gold air and the silver fade And the last bird fly into the last light.1585

The speaker’s descent following his last short-lived ecstasy is both disorientated and lonely. Nikolaus Lenau’s poem “Einsamkeit” (1838) formulates a similar state of despairing loneliness consequent to the loss of God, and the lyrical speaker provokes the lyrical addressee to share that feeling “in der Geschöpfe langen dunklen Gassen”1586 : Lieblos und ohne Gott! der Weg ist schaurig, Der Zugwind durch die Gassen friert; und du? Die ganze Welt ist zum Verzweifeln traurig.1587

The Tree of Knowledge, Byron had said in his heretical / rebours reading of biblical texts, is not the Tree of Life, and the only possible way not to fall into such despair (as he himself was subject to) was to refuse searching thought by keeping thoughtless company, “wine and woman, mirth and laughter.” Contrary to biblical doctrine, the searcher for God is doomed only to find another truth: emptiness and horror. The Pilgrim’s Progress to the Heavenly Jerusalem, the Quest for the Holy Grail, and the Mystical Union with the Divine are demythicized, as well as the promise of Jeremy 29. 13: “And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart”. What James Joyce later called the “negative epiphany” was, however, not Byron’s original invention in Romantic Disillusionism. Years before he began to write, we find it in Karoline von Günderrode’s poem “Der Adept” (1804), concerning the life experience of an Indian sage, Valus, who has acquired both scientific and mystic knowledge of nature to the effect of a disillusioning and horrifying insight into the world’s aimless circles – the later Nietzschean eternal return. This leaves him unhappy, “ennuy8”, and isolated from mankind: 1585 D.G. Rossetti, The House of Life, The Hill Summit, 1870, lines 9–14, in: Collected Poetry and Prose, 158. Note the loss of metaphysics in the symbolic fading out of the colours of the Heavenly Jerusalem. 1586 Lenau, Einsamkeit, line 25, in: Werke und Briefe, ed. cit. II. 214. 1587 Ibid. lines 29–31.

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Nachdem er dreimal so geweihet, Hat er den großen Schritt getan, Der seines Lebens lange Reise Geschieden von der Menschheit Bahn. Viel Zeiten gehen an ihm vorüber, Er siehet die Geschlechter fliehn, Und bleibt allein in allem Wandel, Indes die Dinge kommen, ziehn. Nachdem er oft den Kreis gesehen Den immer die Natur gemacht, Ergreifen Schauer seine Seele, Denn Alles kehrt wie Tag und Nacht. Der Neuheit Reiz ist ihm verloren, Er kennet was die Erde trägt. Er findet sich allein auf Erden, Die Menschen sind nicht sein Geschlecht.1588

The loneliness of the intellectual, including the lecturing and publishing philosopher and poet, is a theme typical of both Romantic Disillusionism and Modernism. Like the narrator of Poe’s “Descent into the Maelström” (1841) or Marlow in Heart of Darkness (1899, 1902), the lifting of the Shelleyan “painted veil” and revelation of the horror vacui isolates them from previous, ignorant companions. Their shared contradiction consists in the fact that they know the misery of knowledge, yet spread it to those who, in their previous ignorance and illusion, were happier. Numerous speakers of D.G. Rossetti’s The House of Life and protagonists of his sonnet sequence, his alter egos, are knowledgeable, experienced questers and artists to whom increasing disillusion has left little hope. They observe “the vase of life” much like Henrik Ibsen claimed to have watched an insect in a vase, seeing their own condition with one comprehending glance from outside. Ibsen’s insect is relatively happy in its illusion that sustained effort will set it free, and Rossetti’s slow, bourgeois creeper around the vase has no view of its disconnected scenes and absurd circles. All distanced, critical observers, however, share the awareness of Byron’s Cain and Manfred that an increase in knowledge is the very contrary of an increase in happiness. The knowledgeable observer must yet live on because his instinct to live drives him on until the empty vase receives his ashes: 1588 Günderrode, Gedichte und Phantasien, Der Adept, 1804, lines 29–44, in: Sämtliche Werke und ausgewählte Studien, I. 50.

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And would have cast it shattered to the flood, Yet in Fate’s name has kept it whole; which now Stands empty till his ashes fall in it.1589

There is a close relationship in outlook and imagery between D.G. Rossetti’s sonnet “The Heart of the Night” (1881) and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In biblical history man meets God in states of physical or psychic darkness. The deeper the darkness, the brighter the epiphany : “The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined”.1590 In Rossetti and Conrad, this epiphany of gladness is replaced with an anti-epiphany of horror – the condition of modern man who has lost his metaphysical grounding and is in danger of trying to gain new terra firma in crude fundamentalisms and easy promises of salvation instead of a “sceptic’s faith”.

1589 D.G.Rossetti, The House of Life, The Vase of Life, 1870, lines 12–4, in: Collected Poetry and Prose, 169. 1590 Isaiah 9, 2.

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Index

absurd circle 40seq., 69, 78, 85seq., 87, 121, 132, 173, 175, 193, 232, 261, 296, 336seq., 340seq., 346, 355, 374, 385, 393, 400, 402, 417, 421, 438, 449, 452, 458 Aeneas 248, 290 Aeschylus 326, 402 agnosticism 47, 81, 90, 398, 442, 450 Ahasuerus (Wandering Jew) 38, 254, 406 aimlessness 22, 65, 80seq., 125, 128, 131, 170, 196, 205seq., 208, 213seq., 223seq., 254, 278, 281, 283, 293, 331seq., 335– 378, 402seq., 418, 422, 425seq., 444seq., 448, 457 alcohol, drunkenness 90, 109, 136seq., 140, 209, 295, 214, 403, 452 Alembert, Jean le Rond d’ 165 Alexander the Great 109 Alleingültigkeitsanspruch, exclusive validity claim 13 American Revolution 132seq. American Transcendentalists 10, 55, 76 amoral universe and moral universe 48, 208, 233seq., 310, 313, 405, 444, 446 anamnesis 84, 115, 135, 172, 348, 418, 426 ancien r8gime 22, 24, 40seq., 59, 99, 108, 110, 123, 125, 130seq., 133seq., 147seq., 150, 169, 180, 198, 222, 231, 239, 314, 319, 337–339, 341, 343, 345, 413, 434 anti-normativity and normativity 15, 59, 441, 453 antithetically-mixed nature of man 62, 109, 197, 233, 279, 337, 346, 394, 451seq.

Apollonian and Dionysian 28, 94, 127seq., 148, 222 Apuleius 135 Arcesilaus 21 Ariosto, Ludovico 46, 211, 290, 298 Aristippus 214, 327 aristocracy 16, 29, 32, 59, 74, 100seq., 111, 133, 141, 152, 161, 168seq., 175, 222, 231, 252, 325, 336, 339seq., 345, 364 Aristophanes 36, 49 Aristotle 10, 97, 152, 168, 197, 205, 226, 305, 329, 448 Armenia 31 Arnim, Achim von 336 art for art’s sake, l’art pour l’art, aestheticism 276, 444 artist 15, 17, 39–41, 52, 68, 71, 83, 87, 128, 161seq., 188, 213seq., 216, 297, 323– 325, 327, 404, 458 ataraxia, tranquillity of mind 54, 275, 433 atavism 66, 97, 212, 217, 232, 294 atheism 48, 51, 81, 165, 311, 398 Augustine of Hippo 9 Austen, Jane 25, 73, 234, 246 Aytoun, William Edmondstoune 23, 295 Bacon, Francis 11 Bailey, Philip James 23seq., 47, 215 Baillie, Joanna 42, 46, 61, 184, 197 Baillie, Matthew 61 Barbey d’Aurevilly, Jules 28, 47, 62 Baroque 38, 65, 146, 276, 278, 407, 413

474 bathos, bubble-pricking 23, 25, 27, 31, 42, 69, 240, 310 Baudelaire, Charles 15, 20, 26, 28–30, 40, 47, 51seq., 64, 81, 106, 108, 112, 119, 127, 137, 143seq., 162, 170, 187–190, 213seq., 221, 238seq., 244, 253, 274– 276, 316seq., 380seq., 383seq., 397, 399seq., 403, 430seq. Bayle, Pierre 21, 443 Beattie, James 13, 61 Beckford, William Thomas 59, 74 Beddoes, Thomas Lovell 22, 31, 42, 47, 50seq., 113, 127, 264, 284, 381seq., 404– 407, 415seq., 422, 424, 430 Beethoven, Ludwig van 19, 38, 41, 73, 118, 368 Bellini, Vincenzo 196 B8ranger, Pierre-Jean de 29 Biedermeier 24seq., 42seq., 55, 73, 110, 118, 153seq., 161, 207, 278, 338, 415, 449 Blair, Hugh 350, 356 Blair, Robert 77, 88, 308 Blake, William 6seq., 10–12, 16–19, 23, 25, 27, 36seq., 43, 53, 56, 71, 73, 83, 105, 112, 115, 119, 134seq., 139seq., 144– 147, 151, 155, 165, 171seq., 184, 214, 237, 311, 314, 330, 340, 416seq., 427, 429 Blessington, Marguerite, Countess of 13, 251, 257, 261–264, 350, 353, 357, 369, 373 Bloomfield, Nathaniel 298 Bloomfield, Robert 298 Blücher, Gebhard Leberecht, Field-Marshall 203, 279 Boccaccio 32 Böttiger, Karl August 71 Bol&var, Simjn 111, 190, 202, 361 Borel, P8trus 20, 26, 29, 33, 47, 161, 244, 275 Bossuet, Jacques-B8nigne 335 Boswell, James 34, 305 bourgeoisie 24, 43, 48, 66, 97, 137, 142, 198seq., 314, 318, 324, 326, 332, 412, 447, 458 Brentano, Clemens 62, 71, 73, 179, 186 Bront[, Branwell 27, 47, 85seq., 397seq.

Index

Bront[, Charlotte 16, 368 Bront[, Emily 12, 16, 27, 47, 62, 85, 132, 149seq., 193, 201, 232, 381, 397, 434 Brucker, Johann Jakob 9 Brummell, George Bryan (“Beau Brummel”) 33 Büchner, Georg 26, 47seq., 51, 71, 101, 112–114, 155, 171, 216seq., 219, 223seq., 275, 284, 324, 326, 341, 344, 352, 396, 399, 402seq., 406, 409, 412– 417, 446seq., 450 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de 438 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward 33, 60, 65, 101seq., 105seq., 111, 233, 340 Burden Morris, Jane 276 Burns, Robert 102, 453 Byron, Lord (George Gordon Noel) 11, 13–27, 29–48, 51–54, 56–63, 65, 69, 71seq., 74–80, 82seq., 85–87, 92, 94–96, 98, 100–102, 105, 109, 111seq., 114, 116, 118–130, 132seq., 136–142, 144, 146, 149–151, 153–161, 164–181, 183–194, 196–214, 216–222, 224–229, 231–233, 235–276, 278–295, 297–306, 309–329, 331–338, 340, 342–346, 348–383, 385– 387, 389, 398, 401–403, 406–410, 412, 415seq., 418–424, 426–430, 433–437, 440, 443, 445, 447–453, 457seq. Byronism 14, 16, 22seq., 25seq., 30, 35, 44, 72, 79, 119, 153, 156, 161, 198, 235, 241, 318, 343seq., 376seq. Cabanis, Pierre-Jean-Georges 90 Cagliostro, Alessandro, Conte di (Giuseppe Balsamo) 16 Calderjn de la Barca, Pedro 278, 408 Cambridge Platonists 9seq. Campbell, Thomas 34, 453 Canning, George 121 Carlyle, Thomas 22seq., 25, 47, 72, 97, 129, 328, 451 Castlereagh, Viscount 121–123, 392 catastrophism 77, 177 Catharine II, Empress of Russia 172, 287seq.

Index

Cato the Younger 261 Chalandritsanos, Loukas 370seq. chance, accident, coincidence, Zufall 81, 96, 105, 140, 176, 196, 198–200, 207, 210, 216, 223, 226, 268, 285, 318, 337, 339, 342, 344, 403seq., 413seq., 417, 422, 425, 443 Chamisso, Adelbert von 186 Charles X, King of France 342 Charlotte Augusta, Princess 397 Chateaubriand, FranÅois-Ren8, Vicomte de 53, 121seq., 147, 159seq. Christ, Jesus of Nazareth 11, 45seq., 120, 134seq., 145, 155seq., 159seq., 171, 210, 223, 335, 361, 364, 380, 383, 397 Christian Gothic 55, 206 Christianity 9, 23, 36, 39, 53, 77, 96, 133– 135, 155, 159, 179, 191, 195, 214, 217, 231, 234, 336, 445 Cicero 152, 298, 350, 395, 443 Clare, John 44seq., 47, 78, 85, 116, 210seq., 265, 302seq., 327seq., 409–411 Clarke, John 147 Clarke, William Cowden 147 Clough, Arthur Hugh 396seq. Colburn, Henry 32, 247 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 10, 13, 15, 17, 24, 51–53, 73, 76, 78, 97, 101, 115, 130, 134, 139, 144, 146seq., 150–152, 155, 177, 179, 188, 206–208, 216, 224, 243, 326, 345, 350, 438, 452, 455 Collin, Heinrich von 104 Collin, Matthäus von 104 Collins, William Wilkie 24 Condorcet, Jean-Antoine-Nicolas 335 Congress of Vienna 34, 35, 78, 111, 122, 130, 147, 153, 169, 223, 233, 237seq., 374, 380, 423 Conrad, Joseph 28, 65, 181, 209, 313, 354, 377, 393, 455, 459 contingency 24, 30, 40, 58, 74seq., 95, 110, 113, 127, 163, 185, 199, 210, 233, 280seq., 300, 318, 330, 336, 339, 346, 380, 440seq., 443, 451 Cousin, Victor 10 Crabbe, George 25, 350, 453

475 creator, creation, creature 19, 24, 30, 45seq., 50, 64, 70, 74, 79, 102, 104, 112seq., 133, 138seq., 143seq., 155, 157seq., 162–164, 168, 187–189, 195, 204seq., 214, 223, 227, 239, 242, 247, 251, 267seq., 275, 297seq., 309seq., 313seq., 316seq., 319, 321–323, 329, 338, 340, 378, 386, 390, 400, 402seq., 410, 417, 443, 447seq., 451 Crowe, Catherine 60 Cuvier, Georges 303seq., 390 Dacre, Charlotte 43, 57, 96, 136 dandy, dandyism 20, 161seq., 189, 214, 238, 276, 331seq., 372 Dante Alighieri 32, 34seq., 132, 148, 170, 172–174, 216, 251, 254, 265seq., 298seq., 322–325, 361, 386, 389, 407, 418seq., 430, 456 Danton, Georges-Jacques 112, 216seq., 224, 324, 344, 399, 402seq., 412seq., 450 Dark Romanticism, schwarze Romantik 14, 58, 240, 456 Darwin, Erasmus 89, 92, 104, 176, 195, 303, 417 Decadence 24, 56, 65, 87, 161, 173, 233, 244, 395, 399, 405, 407, 457 deism 46, 321, 332 Delacroix, EugHne 15, 64, 208 Della Cruscans 136 De Quincey, Thomas 89, 93, 96–98, 104, 116–118, 137–140, 214, 306seq., 316 Descartes, Ren8 18, 97, 436 dialectics 34, 191, 336 Dickens, Charles 27seq., 60, 94, 99seq., 105, 167, 243 Diderot, Denis 39, 69, 71, 84, 94, 165 Disraeli, Benjamin 44, 75, 100seq., 111, 243seq., 423, 436seq. D’Israeli, Isaac 423 Dobell, Sydney 47, 294–296 dogma 25, 27, 48, 51, 78, 144seq., 159, 211, 290, 433seq., 445, 448, 450 doppelganger 14, 63, 65, 67, 101–103, 105, 107seq., 110, 133, 166seq., 249, 283, 311, 319, 345, 438

476 Dowson, Ernest 190 dream 10, 12, 27, 30, 34–36, 38, 40–42, 44seq., 47, 49seq., 53seq., 60, 65, 68, 73seq., 81–83, 85–90, 93seq., 97, 103, 112–115, 118, 125, 130, 132, 134–137, 139, 141, 143, 145, 148–150, 154, 156, 159, 165, 167, 170, 173seq., 180, 183– 187, 189, 192, 198, 200, 203, 214–216, 218seq., 224, 233, 235, 238–240, 253, 258seq., 261seq., 265seq., 268–270, 278–281, 285, 293, 296–298, 314, 328seq., 336, 338, 341, 343, 354, 365– 369, 374, 381seq., 387seq., 393, 395seq., 398–400, 402seq., 408, 416, 418seq., 426, 430, 438, 450, 455 Drummond, Sir William 225, 443 drugs, laudanum, anodyne 86, 90, 132, 137, 141seq., 174, 214, 277, 323, 388seq., 440 duality, dualit8 14, 47, 106seq., 345, 422, 438, 453 Eichendorff, Joseph von 53, 77, 84, 158seq., 212–214, 426 Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans) 425 Eliot, T(homas) S(tearns) 30, 189, 296, 425 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 10, 17, 55, 108, 139, 141, 165, 181, 183, 223seq., 350, 451 Emmet, Robert 35 Empedocles 147, 329 empiricism 9, 17, 145, 165, 438 emptiness, horror vacui 46, 51seq., 141, 347, 399, 418, 457seq. Engels, Friedrich 337 Enlightenment, SiHcle des LumiHres, Aufklärung 9, 12–14, 16–21, 41, 49seq., 52, 55, 57, 59, 62seq., 67, 70seq., 87–89, 92, 94, 96, 105, 117, 121, 134, 152, 163, 165, 172, 191seq., 195, 197, 240, 313seq., 335seq., 379, 434, 436, 438, 456 ennui, taedium vitae 29, 51seq., 112, 137, 151, 159, 205, 232, 274, 317, 372, 375, 379, 403, 407, 429–431, 457 Epictetus 261

Index

Epicurus, Epicureanism 214, 217, 327– 329, 443 epoche, suspended judgment 54, 433 Ernst, Max 14, 16 eros, eros kai thanatos, Liebeslager und Totenbett 21, 131, 144, 240, 241seq., 277, 383, 430 Eros and Anteros 31, 240–242, 277, 383seq. 430 Espronceda, Jos8 de 47, 116, 119, 204seq., 236, 447 Euhemeros 266 Euripides 59, 104, 127, 193 exile, banishment 21, 31seq., 36seq., 47, 121, 155, 173, 186, 201, 212, 218, 244, 258, 272, 317, 322seq., 341seq., 372, 378, 392, 421, 423seq. fate, fatum, ananke 14, 21, 31, 41, 57seq., 60, 81, 85, 94–96, 110, 113, 119, 132, 137, 156, 163, 169, 171seq., 191, 193–195, 198–203, 205 seq., 223seq., 227, 231, 233, 238, 240, 242, 246–251, 255, 261, 286, 288, 295, 311, 318, 322, 325 seq., 329seq., 338, 340, 344, 368, 371, 375, 379, 385, 390, 395, 398, 411, 419, 423, 425, 428, 459 feminism, anti-feminism 68, 244, 275 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 50, 54, 79, 435 Ficino, Marsilio 11 Fielding, Henry 88, 211, 362 Fin de SiHcle 24, 56, 65, 180, 244, 279, 317, 395, 399, 403, 405 Fitzgerald, Edward 113, 138, 141, 143, 163seq., 223, 321, 329, 331, 441seq. Flaxman, John 17 Flaubert, Gustave 274 Foix, Gaston de, Duc de Nemours 299, 361 Forster, Georg 14, 87, 108 Fortune 199, 226, 290, 361 Foscolo, Ugo 31, 47, 375 Fouqu8, Friedrich Heinrich Karl, Baron de la Motte 186 fragmentation 12, 33, 36, 40, 49, 52seq., 54, 69–71, 73, 92, 134, 136, 139, 146, 151,

Index

170, 176, 181, 184, 197, 214, 217, 237, 286, 311, 323, 337, 389, 413, 415seq., 450seq. Freiligrath, Ferdinand 186, 375, 394 French Revolution 15, 34, 38, 94, 99, 101, 103, 108seq., 111, 132, 144, 146, 148, 152seq., 202, 231, 261, 336, 338seq., 342, 344seq., 362seq., 391 Freud, Sigmund 38, 58, 60seq., 65, 74, 88– 90., 93, 99, 108, 126, 167, 212, 220, 284, 422, 441 Friedrich, Caspar David 12, 18, 25, 65, 71, 79, 94, 121, 159, 186seq., 198, 223, 414, 436, 443, 456 Gall, Franz Joseph 90, 191 Gaskell, Elizabeth 27, 60 Gautier, Th8ophile 28, 160 George III, King 121seq. George IV, Prince Regent and King 121, 168, 448 G8ricault, Th8odore 15, 64, 92, 208 German Idealist philosophy 78, 152, 179, 438 Gessner, Salomon 24 Geworfenheit, thrownness 46, 52, 157, 190, 213, 219, 221, 416, 449 Gibbon, Edward 15, 335 Gnosis 11, 134 seq., 143seq., 155, 187, 410, 427, 440 God 17, 22, 45seq., 48, 73, 76, 80seq., 85seq., 109, 115, 120, 134, 143, 148, 156seq., 159, 163seq., 172seq., 182, 184, 205seq., 208, 213, 220, 242, 246, 253seq., 267, 269, 277, 280, 283, 291, 296, 311– 315, 317, 319, 321seq., 332, 336, 338seq., 349, 377, 380, 383, 385seq., 400, 410, 418, 422–424, 444seq., 447seq., 454, 457, 459 Godwin, William 31, 96, 104, 129, 133seq., 151seq., 155, 175, 194, 321, 349, 362seq., 367 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 23, 26, 39, 78, 82, 103, 107seq., 131, 150, 190, 215, 233, 246seq., 282seq., 310seq., 324, 352seq., 372seq., 375seq., 393, 426, 444, 448

477 Gogol, Nikolay 198 Gordon Riots of 1780 94, 351 Görres, Joseph 73, 147, 179seq. Gothic 14–16, 19seq., 24, 27seq., 32, 35, 38, 40seq., 43, 46seq., 49seq., 55, 57–63, 65–67, 74–76, 88seq., 94, 96–98, 102, 107, 110, 132seq., 139–141, 143, 152, 159, 175, 182, 192–197, 206seq., 233, 235seq., 249, 279, 311, 319, 321, 339, 345, 379, 384, 411, 418, 438–440 Goya y Lucientes, Franciso 14–16 Grabbe, Christian Dietrich 26, 47seq., 78, 109, 161, 203, 222, 279, 313, 326, 330, 340seq., 403, 409, 415, 445–447, 450 grand n8ant 50, 106, 180, 264, 331, 397, 399seq., 403, 407, 430 Graveyard School 14, 16, 77, 88, 154, 388 Greece 22, 109, 112, 291, 343, 348, 370– 373, 375seq., 433 Grillparzer, Franz 25, 40, 47, 92, 95seq., 103seq., 110, 167, 187seq., 192, 197, 200, 222, 228, 232seq., 241seq., 278seq., 294, 318, 324, 337, 343seq., 367, 379seq. Grimm, Jacob 219 Grimm, Wilhelm 219 Guiccioli, Teresa 45, 243, 251, 257, 369, 375seq. Günderrode, Karoline von 46, 68, 131, 201, 366, 387seq., 401, 457seq. Gutzkow, Karl 47seq., 51, 322, 407 Guy, Constantin 213, 304 Haitian Revolution 103 Hardy, Thomas 28, 81seq., 108seq., 127, 155, 163, 223seq., 268seq., 303, 330, 402, 418 Hartmann, Eduard von 79seq., 356 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 24, 55, 76, 95seq., 188 Hayes, Mary 153 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 18, 73, 79seq., 121, 126, 179seq., 191, 336, 341, 343 Heimweh, Sehnsucht, Wanderlust 12, 53, 116, 212seq., 431

478 Heine, Heinrich 26, 28–30, 33seq., 47seq., 51, 69, 71–73, 92, 116, 121, 130, 136, 141, 146, 161seq., 164, 179–182, 184–187, 189, 205, 213, 218, 221–223, 237, 253, 274seq., 301, 305seq., 313seq., 327, 342seq., 351–353, 365, 395, 409, 418, 424–426, 429seq., 444seq., 449, 453–456 hell, heaven 12, 18, 22, 27, 33, 44, 74, 97, 107, 110, 113, 119–121, 123, 132, 134, 138, 140, 144, 148, 156, 162seq., 170seq., 173seq., 179, 185, 190, 195, 206, 208, 219, 242seq., 259, 261, 263, 266seq., 271, 273, 282, 295, 309, 311, 313–315, 319, 325, 332, 336–339, 347, 361seq., 381, 386seq., 389, 396seq., 399–404, 406seq., 410, 414, 418, 422, 442, 446, 448 Helv8tius, Claude-Adrien 165 Hemans, Felicia Dorothea 25, 43seq., 153seq., 170, 178, 220, 295, 375 Hesiod 335 heterodoxy 47, 165, 441 heterogeneity 9, 19, 62, 65, 91, 103, 290, 311, 451 heteronomy and autonomy 18, 62, 74, 78seq., 91, 191seq., 194seq., 232, 335, 367 Hindu, Hinduism 77, 134, 149, 224 Hobbes, Thomas 97 Hodgson, Francis 358, 434, 450 Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus 38– 41, 46, 64, 84, 93, 95seq., 99, 103seq., 142, 200, 215, 435seq., 439seq. Hogg, James 102, 453 Hölderlin, Friedrich 73, 147, 398 Holbach, Baron d’ (Paul-Henri Thiry) 9, 165, 191, 275, 314 Holy Alliance 35, 111, 121, 203 Homer 178, 226, 231, 248, 290, 300 Hone, William 34 Hugo, Victor 28, 107, 159seq., 182, 187, 189, 245, 319 Hume, David 10, 15, 18, 21, 61, 433, 436, 443 Hunt, John 31 Hunt, Leigh 31, 36, 54, 147seq., 337, 443 hypnosis 93

Index

Ibsen, Henrik 30, 389, 458 Idealism, Idealist philosophy 10, 78seq., 120, 179 illusion, phantasmagoria 41, 52, 65, 68seq., 71, 79, 81, 83, 85seq., 93, 104, 112seq., 116–118, 125, 131, 138seq., 145, 149, 158seq., 166, 174seq., 177– 179, 181, 187, 199, 202, 215, 219, 221seq., 224, 232, 236, 239, 242, 244, 252seq., 257, 259, 264seq., 268seq., 273–275, 281–283, 285, 293, 297–299, 301, 306, 313, 317, 340, 345, 348, 354, 358, 362, 367, 385–390, 392seq., 404, 408, 416, 419, 427seq., 430, 441, 445, 449–451, 458 Immermann, Karl 24seq. immortality 11, 27, 48, 63, 116, 135, 182seq., 233, 251, 254, 261seq., 286, 288–292, 298–303, 305, 377, 398 Industrial Revolution 77, 134, 146 injustice and justice 11, 28, 32, 38, 79, 98, 103, 131, 138, 150, 152seq., 157–159, 175, 187, 192, 217, 236, 249, 280, 287, 309–324, 329seq., 332seq., 336–338, 340, 345, 364seq., 367, 372, 401seq., 406, 423, 428, 433, 435, 440, 443, 445, 447 inspiration 22, 31, 43seq., 98, 127, 139, 163, 176, 188, 237, 266, 322, 348, 383, 397, 455 Irish Revolution 35seq. isolation 12, 31seq., 45, 47, 57, 73, 83, 157, 178, 197, 219, 239, 369, 383, 386, 409seq., 412, 414–416, 422, 424, 441, 455 Jean Paul (Johann Paul Friedrich Richter) 24, 46, 63seq., 67, 104, 380, 406, 436 Jeunes-France, Les 20, 26, 160 Johnson, Lionel 190 Johnson, Samuel 9, 305, 362 Jew, Judaism 18seq., 37seq., 87, 104, 122, 134, 146, 185, 197, 228, 247, 254, 406, 421, 423seq., 445seq. Julian the Apostate 15, 165 Jung-Stilling, Heinrich 213 Kaczkowski, Zygmunt 377

Index

kalokagathia 10, 30, 127, 159, 178, 283, 403, 443 Kant, Immanuel 17seq., 50, 96, 172, 335, 434 Kaufmann, Christoph 414seq. Keats, John 34, 44, 54, 62, 77, 91seq., 102, 124, 127, 131, 138, 143, 147seq., 150, 153, 159, 168–171, 177seq., 188, 203, 215, 254seq., 268seq., 276seq., 295, 301–303, 328, 342, 358, 393, 402, 443, 452 Kierkegaard, Søren 73 Klingemann, Ernst August Friedrich 46, 48–50, 52, 78, 95, 112, 130, 175, 262, 274, 284, 413seq., 422, 441, 444seq. Kosciuszko, Tadeusz 34 La Mettrie, Julien-Offray de 165 Laforgue, Jules 28 Lamartine, Alphonse de 29seq., 159, 251seq., 376 Lamb, Caroline, Viscountess Melbourne 32, 48, 74seq., 96, 102, 235, 240, 243, 452seq. Lamb, Charles 90seq., 140 Lamb, William, Viscount Melbourne 32 Landon, Letitia Elizabeth 25, 43seq., 116, 118, 153seq., 207seq., 233, 302 Lautr8amont, Comte de (Isidore Ducasse) 220 Lavater, Johann Kaspar 171 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 18 Lenau, Nikolaus 47, 116, 124–126, 457 Lenz, Jakob Michael Reinhold 341, 414seq. Leopardi, Giacomo 26, 47, 51, 78, 112, 127, 146, 161–163, 170, 174, 178, 198, 223, 236seq., 240, 274, 313seq., 323, 401, 409, 443, 447, 449seq. Lermontov, Mikhail 47seq., 53, 81, 100, 136seq., 141, 206, 232, 265seq., 293seq., 302, 317, 368, 417 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 18 Lewis, Matthew Gregory 20, 59, 76, 96, 196

479 liberal, liberalism 31, 35, 82, 112, 121, 125, 216, 237, 337, 344, 372, 374, 376, 378, 392, 423 Liebestod, transfiguration in love 282, 429 Ligne, Charles Joseph Lamoral, Prince de 221, 237, 290, 300 Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 18, 94 Locke, John 11 Lockhart, John Gibson 62, 453 Louis Philippe I, King of France 342 Louis XVIII, King 121, 341, 448 Loutherbourg, Philippe-Jacques de 16 Lucian 74, 122 M#cha, Karel Hynek 47, 311 Maclise, Daniel 44 madness 16seq., 41seq., 44, 46, 58, 63, 65seq., 83seq., 92, 94, 99, 103, 116, 120, 142, 147, 150, 160, 165seq., 180, 191, 196, 209seq., 215seq., 245, 294, 320, 323, 339, 380, 385, 398, 405, 415, 418seq., 424seq., 433, 438, 446seq. Mallarm8, St8phane 28, 188, 431 Malthus, Thomas Robert 175, 355 Marcus Aurelius 261 marriage 67, 83, 107, 135, 150, 183, 192, 223seq., 235, 237, 264seq., 274, 320, 344seq., 368, 386, 389, 392, 412seq., 414, 418seq. Marryat, Florence 60 Marx, Karl 53, 186, 337 Marxism 130, 186, 337 materialism 134, 215, 238, 262 Mathews, Charles 102 Maturin, Charles Robert 20, 35seq., 38, 47, 94seq., 159, 196seq. Mavrokordatos, Alexandros 112, 373 Melville, Herman 11, 47, 55seq., 76, 78, 107, 167 memory, mnemosyne 9, 44, 115, 118–120, 139, 256, 272, 290, 296, 298, 300, 323, 369, 385–387, 390, 405, 312, 318, 439, 453, 455, 472 Meredith, George 28, 382, 389seq., 420

480 Mesmer, Franz Anton 60, 74, 89, 92seq., 99, 107 mesmerism, magnetism 28, 66, 76, 90, 92seq., 95, 99, 100, 142, 161 metaphysics 9 seq., 17seq., 23, 27, 37, 45, 61, 71, 74seq., 78, 95, 114, 127seq., 136, 144, 146, 149, 178, 185, 188, 191seq., 214, 216, 219, 225seq., 234, 242, 255, 278,302, 309, 326, 332seq., 343, 348, 382, 384, 401, 413, 418seq., 426, 429, 431, 435, 438, 443, 448, 4556seq., 459 Mickiewicz, Adam 376seq. Milbanke-Byron, Anna Isabella (Annabella), Lady Noel 243, 247 Mill, John Stuart 23, 273 Millennium, millenarianism 24, 35seq,. 42, 47, 50, 133seq., 144, 146, 148, 155, 185, 239, 338, 341, 343, 365, 367, 398 Milton, John 215, 452 mirage, fata morgana 268, 393, 395 Modernism 30, 83, 441, 451, 458 Mörike, Eduard 25 Moir, David Macbeth 77seq. Monboddo, James Burnett, Lord 436 Montaigne, Michel de 21, 434, 443 Moore, Thomas 31, 100, 132, 243, 256, 285, 368, 433, 449, 452seq. More, Hannah 152 Müller, Adam 122 Müller, Friedrich von 373 Müller, Wilhelm 82, 220, 346, 396, 412, 422, 424 Murray, John 62, 66, 211, 227, 245, 298, 350, 358, 363, 423, 437, 450, 452 Muslim, Islam 18, 34, 77, 217seq., 246, 282 Musset, Alfred de 21seq., 28, 30, 47, 52, 72seq., 75, 78, 86, 92, 116seq., 141, 161seq., 194, 198, 237seq., 251seq., 279, 284, 317seq., 323, 326, 328, 375seq., 402, 409 Naples 176, 396–398 Napoleon Bonaparte 108, 200 Nathan, Isaac 18seq., 298, 421, 423 nautical Gothic 206

Index

Neapolitan Revolution 31 necessity, necessitarianism 94, 132, 134, 163, 191, 194, 248, 254, 310, 316, 321, 362, 380 Negative Romanticism, Romantic Disillusionism 13seq., 18–22, 24–30, 32, 37, 41, 46seq., 49, 51, 56seq., 65, 73–76, 78– 80, 82seq., 85, 98, 106–108, 113seq., 118, 124, 126–129, 131, 133, 139, 141, 149seq., 153–156, 158–160, 164–166, 168, 170, 173, 175, 180, 186seq., 191seq., 195, 198–200, 203, 218, 223, 227, 236, 246, 274, 281, 302, 306, 310, 332, 343, 368, 384, 389seq., 393, 395, 399, 403– 406, 410, 415seq., 429, 441, 446, 457seq. Nelson, Horatio, Admiral 290 Neoplatonists 9seq. Nerval, G8rard de 26, 28, 47, 92, 144, 160, 215seq., 218seq., 323, 380seq. Newman, John Henry 396 Novalis 49, 53seq., 73, 95seq., 114, 146, 185, 214, 336, 429 Omar Khayy#m 113, 138, 141, 143, 163seq., 321, 329, 331, 441seq. O’Neill, Eugene 389, 417 Origen 9 Ovid 183, 241, 243, 335, 417 paganism, neopaganism 103 Palmer, Samuel 84 paradis artificiels (alcohol, drugs) 137seq., 316, 384, 400 Paradise Lost 39, 83seq., 117seq., 132, 135, 139, 156, 158, 178seq., 181, 187, 215, 274, 314, 340, 423, 426seq. Paradise Regained 25, 27, 36, 49, 53, 55, 78, 83seq., 99, 105, 116seq., 131seq., 135, 137seq., 140, 144, 146, 149, 156, 159, 170, 174seq., 181, 185seq., 194, 212seq., 221, 240, 314, 322, 327, 338, 373, 389, 410, 426seq., 437, 455 Pater, Walter 13, 28, 62, 214, 221, 331, 440seq. Peacock, Thomas Love 43seq., 106, 118, 148, 154, 208, 302, 453

Index

Philhellenism 22, 82, 375 Philoctetes 32 phrenology 90, 191, 204 Pichot, Am8d8e 161, 323 Piranesi, Giambattista 96seq. Pisan Circle 31seq., 176 Platen, August Graf von 47, 185, 240–242, 395seq. Plato 9–11, 17, 25, 28, 36, 47, 61, 127, 130, 136, 177, 179, 210, 225, 228, 256, 262, 312, 332, 382, 389, 397, 435, 447, 450 Platonism 9–11, 17, 30, 36seq., 39seq., 51, 73, 84, 114seq., 132–134, 142, 145, 149, 165, 168, 179, 191, 225seq., 240, 259, 327, 336, 449 Plotinus 10 Plutarch 247, 300, 305, 342 Poe, Egar Allan 19, 26seq., 41, 47, 55, 75, 84, 92, 102, 106,137, 142, 155, 182, 233, 358, 385 Polidori, John William 32, 47, 51, 59, 95, 160, 194, 196, 244, 278, 435 Polybius 335 Pope, Alexander 13, 57, 62, 118, 122, 144, 162, 205, 211, 305, 351seq., 452 Positive Romanticism, Romantic Platonism 17seq., 20seq., 25seq., 28, 41, 56, 72, 74, 76, 79, 83seq., 86, 98, 104, 114, 116, 124, 127, 129seq., 132–135, 141, 150, 153, 155seq., 159, 166, 170, 177– 180, 186, 191, 195, 214, 216, 221, 224seq., 232, 237, 272, 276, 320, 323, 326, 333, 349seq., 352, 365, 368, 409, 414seq., 422, 426, 429 Postmodernism 441, 448, 451 Pre-Raphaelites 28, 389, 411 Preromanticism 9, 13, 49, 178, 321 princesse lointaine, distant princess, Fernidol 113seq., 214–216, 224, 233, 266, 418 Proclus 10 progress, meliorism 14, 18, 20, 22, 34, 41, 47, 49, 52, 54seq., 57, 60, 65seq., 79, 105, 124, 128, 148, 152, 163, 174–176, 185, 194, 207, 212, 258, 293, 305–307, 321, 323, 335–337, 341–343, 345seq.,

481 348seq., 353, 355seq., 360, 365, 368seq., 408, 441, 457 Prometheus, Prometheanism 25, 29, 34, 39, 64, 104seq., 128, 135, 147–149, 153– 165, 173, 175, 187, 189, 204, 219, 233, 310seq., 325seq., 330, 332, 364, 368, 383 psychoanalysis, psychiatry 15, 89, 92seq., 96, 99, 108, 167, 198, 235, 388, 438 Pulci, Luigi 227, 452 Pushkin, Alexandr 29, 37seq., 47, 100, 151, 232, 246, 265, 301seq., 327 Puys8gur, Armand Marie Jacques de Chastenet, Marquis de 88, 93 Pyrrho 10, 21, 28, 72, 112, 130, 158, 282, 382, 433, 440, 443 Pyrrhonism, scepticism 11, 14, 21–23, 51, 54, 72, 76, 83, 87, 89, 130, 132, 160, 183, 233, 240, 258, 299, 328, 356, 358, 377, 434, 440, 445, 449seq. Radcliffe, Ann 59, 160, 415 Radicalism 15, 42seq., 133, 150seq. Ranke, Leopold von 343 Rapp, George 265 Reeve, Clara 58 Regency 111, 121, 147, 168 resurrection 27, 48, 67, 80seq., 131, 135, 140seq., 145, 148, 155, 170, 177, 189, 192, 208, 340, 377, 379–408 Richardson, Samuel 19, 37, 58, 88, 113, 131, 305 Rimbaud, Arthur 28, 137seq., 431 Robespierre, Maximilien de 342, 344, 402 Robinson, Mary 80seq., 152, 207seq., 241seq., 253, 384seq., 409seq. Robertson, William 147 Rochester, Earl of (John Wilmot) 16, 329, 442 Rodenbach, Georges 388 Rogers, Samuel 452seq. romantiques d8froqu8s 48, 131, 145 romantisme fr8n8tique 14 Rome 101, 109, 111, 179, 213, 252, 274, 284, 298, 340, 358, 391, 393–395, 398, 433, 437

482 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 28, 47, 51, 87, 108, 116, 119seq., 132, 193, 199, 233, 242, 276seq., 303, 329, 347seq., 385–389, 411seq., 414, 416, 430, 437seq., 445, 456–459 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 10, 13–15, 18, 57, 89, 100, 131, 150, 172, 232, 246, 260seq., 451 Rückert, Friedrich 77, 130, 237, 258, 269, 301, 417 ruin, ruins 110, 114, 166, 170, 176, 181, 184, 200, 220, 224, 243seq., 247, 251– 254, 258, 265, 273, 281, 286, 288, 298, 348, 352, 363, 393–395, 398, 410, 418, 434, 438 Sade, Marquis de 19seq., 56seq., 60, 67, 88, 155, 225, 247, 275, 314, 382 Sand, George 53, 258, 376 Satan, Satanism 25, 29, 123, 187, 204, 364 satire 10, 24, 28, 50, 71, 73seq., 82–84, 104, 110, 121seq., 132, 171, 185, 216, 224, 227, 237, 239, 265, 287, 290, 292, 332, 351seq., 358, 403, 415, 442, 446, 449seq. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm 15, 54, 79, 152, 335, 438 Schicksalstragödie; fate tragedy 96, 110, 379 Schiller, Friedrich 12, 38, 54, 115seq., 131, 149, 301, 324, 365, 415, 444 Schlegel, August Wilhelm 53seq., 71, 73, 104, 121, 179, 197 Schlegel, Friedrich 49, 53seq., 69seq., 71– 74, 78, 121, 147, 179 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 54, 74, 84 Schopenhauer, Arthur 78seq., 109seq., 114, 121, 149, 157, 162, 192, 211seq., 220, 223, 227seq., 252, 315seq., 322seq., 332, 343, 381, 401seq., 448 Schubert, Franz 221, 422 Schubert, Gotthilf Heinrich 16, 60, 93, 436 Scott, Walter 73, 108seq., 150, 197, 234, 246, 453

Index

Senancour, Ptienne Pivert de 46, 52, 78, 130, 379, 444 Seneca 329 Sextus Empiricus 21, 72, 158, 282, 433, 440 sexual orientation, variants of sexuality 17, 42, 47, 58, 67, 87seq., 190, 249, 252, 290, 433, 453 Shakespeare, William 80, 86, 113, 173, 177, 196, 198, 249, 273, 279, 297, 300, 364, 371, 393, 401, 403seq., 420, 433 Shelley, Mary 19, 31, 37, 54, 64, 104seq., 109, 116, 118, 131seq., 135seq., 148, 153, 155, 175–179, 184, 194, 221, 234seq., 278, 293, 317, 321, 373–375, 380, 393seq., 404 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 9seq., 25, 31, 34, 36seq., 45, 50, 54, 71, 82, 104, 114–116, 120–122, 124, 127seq., 147seq., 149seq., 153–155, 158, 164–166, 168, 170–174, 176seq., 178, 187seq. 191, 195, 215, 232, 237, 243, 253, 277seq., 293, 299, 303, 321, 332, 337, 342, 349, 362seq., 367, 373, 383, 393, 436, 455, 458 Siddal Rossetti, Elizabeth 242, 276, 385, 411 Słowacki, Juliusz 47, 377 Smith, Alexander 45–47, 59, 292, 294, 296 Socrates 11, 74, 171, 260, 282, 436 soma-sema doctrine 262, 430 Sophocles 59, 193 Southey, Robert 24, 53, 73, 101, 122seq., 144, 146seq., 269, 298, 351, 372, 378, 452 Spallanzani, Lazzaro 64 Spasmodists, Spasmodism 23, 295 Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de) 18, 139 Spurzheim, Johannes 90, 191 Sta[l, Germaine de 179, 200, 220, 380 Stendhal (Henri Beyle) 47, 323, 372 Sterne, Laurence 49, 63, 67, 69, 71seq., 94, 98, 181, 213, 221, 227, 290, 318, 436 Stevenson, Robert Louis 18, 32, 105, 107 Stifter, Adalbert 73 Stoker, Bram 65seq., 345seq. Streitkultur, art of arguing 10, 14, 54, 104, 122, 216, 324

Index

Strindberg, August 244, 389 sublime, sublimity 16, 28, 30, 50, 59, 64, 69, 80, 88, 93, 96, 106, 119, 143, 158–160, 176, 189, 278, 286, 375, 400, 415 Swinburne, Algernon Charles 28, 143, 145, 153, 189, 220, 301, 303, 317, 330seq., 348, 365, 382seq., 393, 399–401 Symons, Arthur 28, 120 Tasso, Torquato 114seq., 141seq., 174, 231, 245, 248, 283, 290, 298, 319seq., 322–325 Taylor, Sir Henry 23, 372, 378 Taylor, John 44 Taylor, Thomas 10, 17 tempus edax 301, 426 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 166, 191seq., 331, 416 Theatre of the Absurd 30, 110, 112, 175, 414 Thompson, Francis 14, 76, 102, 120, 143, 182, 440 Thomson (B.V.), James 17, 27, 114seq., 174seq., 190, 221, 252, 292, 320, 382, 385, 391, 394, 407, 414 Tiberius 369 Tieck, Ludwig 24seq., 39, 46seq., 51seq., 54, 58, 60, 68, 71–73, 78, 83, 116seq., 136, 179seq., 200, 372, 435, 439, 443–445 Tighe, Mary 135 Todessehnsucht, yearning for death 62, 429 Turner, J(oseph) M(allord) W(illiam) 177 Uhland, Ludwig 179 Ulysses (circuitous journey of) 135, 137, 212, 248, 258, 290, 335 unconscious 14seq., 19, 27, 38, 46, 50, 57seq., 60seq., 64–66, 68, 89seq., 92seq., 95, 97, 103, 107, 127, 166–168, 191, 194, 234, 243, 328, 345, 370, 418, 438 Val8ry, Paul 188 vampire, vampirism 16, 37, 58, 60, 66seq., 247, 249, 345, 380, 388, 438seq.

483 Venice 118, 151, 164, 227, 237, 297seq., 309, 365, 368, 383, 391–396, 398 Vereinzelung, individualistic isolation 386 Vico, Giambattista 335 Vigny, Alfred de 30, 159 Villon, FranÅois 189 Virgil 13, 25, 54seq., 57, 59, 73, 156, 172, 176, 178, 226, 231seq., 248, 289seq. visionary 25, 36, 76, 85, 89, 95, 125, 141, 174, 179, 182, 314, 327, 367, 393, 435 Volta, Alessandro 105 Voltaire 9, 15, 22, 172, 335, 339 Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich 39, 54, 68 Waiblinger, Wilhelm Friedrich 47, 398 Walpole, Horace 15, 38, 59, 67, 74, 76, 88seq., 94, 96, 99, 184, 193seq., 196seq., 234, 362 wanderlust 12, 212, 431 wars of liberation 287, 338, 366 Washington, George 111, 202, 361 Waterloo 34seq., 58, 78, 123, 203, 218, 233, 251, 278seq., 341, 355 Weimar Classicism 84, 107, 188, 192, 324, 367 Wellington, Duke of (Arthur Wellesley), Field-Marshall 121, 203, 279, 361 Weltriss 46, 166seq., 185, 422 Welttheater, theatrum mundi, theatre of the world 400, 405, 413 Weltschmerz 62, 159, 429 Whitman, Walt 10 Wilberforce, William 349 Wilde, Oscar 28, 87, 167, 244, 440seq. will-o’-the-wisp, ignis fatuus 112, 114, 126, 138, 172, 178, 203, 217–219, 222, 236, 240, 253, 274, 277, 285, 293, 325seq., 338, 343, 371, 385, 387, 396, 416, 427 Williams, Helen Maria 144, 152 Wilson, John 77, 102, 167seq., 453 Wollstonecraft, Mary 152seq., 362 Woolf, Virginia 451

484 Wordsworth, William 10seq., 23, 25, 43– 45, 53, 63, 73, 77seq., 80, 84, 90, 95seq., 101, 115, 120, 129, 134–136, 139seq., 144, 146seq., 155, 159, 172, 177seq., 183, 188, 214, 216, 225, 237, 259, 295, 297, 300, 302, 306, 326, 384, 412, 420, 427, 452, 455

Index

World Soul, anima mundi 191, 336, 341 World Spirit 336, 380, 393 Yeats, William Butler 64 Young, Edward 16, 51, 61seq., 77, 88, 308